Armor/Costumes

[didory123]

Alright, I know this is a touchy topic, but we need to revisit this.

The general consensus in the beginning seemed to be that we wanted to keep costumes, and show the armor the player was wearing in the HUD. However, @kyleconroy wanted to go the Zelda route and have equipment give players special skills, which all of us liked as well. This brings up the problem of different equipments on different places of the body, if we want to have a variance in the types of equipments (e.g. capes, boots, armor).

Here's my pitch: I'm not sure any of you have played League of Legends, but in that game, each player has six different slots he/she can insert equipments into. Take a look at this picture:

Under inventory, there are six different slots that the player can customize, putting whichever items he/she wants. Duplicate items are fair game too. I'm not sure this is very NES-ey but I think this is a pretty solid idea that incorporates the Zelda theme and our idea of HUDs. Plus, we don't have to do anything with the costumes at all.

Of course, there is another idea that someone brought up on the subreddit that makes costumes just purchasable as armor, though this does put a limit on the variance of items we can create.

Thoughts?

[reddfawks]

As a LoL player, I like this idea.

Maybe I should give everyone Fiddlesticks costu--ACK! Dragged off by one of those Vaudeville Hooks

[CalebJohn]

ya I think this is a good idea if we are going to add in armor, that way we don't need to deal with an overlay and we can have full armor functionality without huge changes, although i am partial to removing costumes and using armor costumes

[edisonout]

I think this is a good option. It means we can keep costumes (which I will forever defend) and requires one sprite for each piece of armor (possibly 2 if we have 1 for pick up & 1 for inventory) as opposed to the 120+ sprites needed for each of the 20 characters.

Would it being in your inventory give you the effects or would you have to select it to use it? Could you use more than one item at once?

I don't think the reddit idea - costumes as armor wouldn't work very well since each character has a different number of costumes and we'd have to tweak it every time there was a new costume.

[bucketh3ad]

For those not familiar with League of Legends, here's a generalized summary of their system as it could potentially apply to our game.

• Equipment purchases do not have a visual element on the character, only in the HUD. When hovered/selected, they have a tooltip that explains the stat bonuses and any special effects they add.
• Costumes are purely for player enjoyment. They do not add any special advantage or disadvantage. They are purchased with real money in LoL making up a significant portion of the game's revenue, but the principle of freely selectable aesthetic choice can apply no matter how the costumes are acquired.
• Some items have unique effects that do not stack, while other items can be stacked multiple times. An example would be boots; only one pair's speed boost will be active even if you have multiple pairs equipped.

I agree with @didory123, and think we could do all of the above without much difficulty. This allows the player loads of freedom to customize their play style without reducing our artists to tears by needing some kind of equipped representation of armor items instead of just inventory icons and possibly collectable nodes.

[kyleconroy]

:+1: Sorry, I let this discussion die. If (and when) we do add armor, I think this is the right approach. We already have so many costumes, that trying to add armor on top would be almost impossible. We'll eventually have to redesign the HUD / inventory, so when that happens we can take into account armor.