In general, the inventory has several problems to solve:
1) It can't be overwhelming to new players when they open it the first time, but it has to scale when your deck and your collection of lacrima grow.
To solve this, I decided to only show the first 6 lacrima slots, and as you collect more, additional satchel cards get displayed. I also hide the next/previous page arrows if you only have one page of cards to display.
2) There are basically two lists: Cards and lacrima. Scrolling two lists can be awkward, so the challenge was to display all lacrima on screen, while making it possible to scroll through the cards as conveniently as possible.
The solution was to increase the displayed cards to ten per page, and display all lacrima at the top in up to 5 satchel cards with their names displayed.
3) Changing cards: This is the main theme of the game, so swapping out lacrima from cards needs to be easy and feel good. By displaying the names of lacrima in the satchels, you no longer have to move your mouse over each individual lacrima, and can basically just have the inventory open to plan your deck.
4) Sorting: Cards and lacrima need to have sort functions. I decided to just add one general sort button for lacrima, which orders them by type, name, and value. For cards, I added several buttons in the lower right.
A special case is the sort option for kills. If you have a modifier lacrima that depends on total kills of a card, you need to see the information. Previously, this was just displayed below each card, which was overwhelming and unnecessary. You only need this information in rare cases. The new "Kills" sort option displays total kills on the cards, until other sort options are chosen.
5) Multiple input options: The inventory needs to work with mouse, keyboard, controller and touch. I always felt that scrollbars don't work that well (especially without a mouse) and are a bit ugly in terms of visuals. That is why you can turn pages with mousewheel, keyboard keys, shoulder buttons on controller, or just touch the arrow buttons. It's quick and you don't have to wrestle with a flimsy scrollbar.
With all these solutions in mind, the inventory currently looks like this:
Apart from inventory changes, the new version of Faith in Despair also includes an improved rarity system. Funnily, the rarity system was already implemented, but overruled by other functions that basically just chose lacrima randomly, without any rarity in mind. After fixing that, I finally got to see the rarity that I set up in a json file in action. Common lacrima like Weak and Shield appeared way more often, and rare ones like Random Buff were much shier. I believe this improves the game a lot, because it also helps with onboarding new players: They will see simple lacrima in the beginning and more complex ones as the run goes on.
Rarity has its own set of issues, though. One problem that came up was that there is currently only one "ultrarare" trigger, namely "On Attack". Which means that, when the game looks for a trigger, decides on ultrarare rarity, then it will always be "On Attack". So, there will have to be more options to choose from in a future update.
As always you can play the free demo on itch.io or Steam.
🧙♂️ To be continued...