Dredge

gamedeveloper.com:

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with a goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren't really that simple at all.

This article was written by Joel Mason -- programmer, writer and co-designer at Black Salt Games, a new, small, studio of four from New Zealand working on our debut game Dredge, a sinister fishing adventure.

In January of 2021 we began prototyping Dredge, our cosmic-horror inspired fishing game. In the first iteration, you'd sail over to a spot bubbling with fish, press an interaction button, and a "+1 Fish" notification would pop up. You'd do this for a while, and then return to a dock to sell your fish.

This was extremely boring.

We had to do something with our inventory system. In a game about a fisherman dealing with their cargo hold, we knew that Inventory Management -- while it may be the dullest sounding Steam tag out there -- had to play a big part. In the end, it turned into the core mechanic for our game.

In this article, we'll walk through how our extensive spatial inventory system works, then dive into the cautionary tales of design ramifications that it had for our game.

Spatial inventory systems revolve around the notion that stuff occupies space. We'll ignore systems such as Skyrim that just add item weights against maximum player encumbrance, as they don't concern space.

Really, a spatial inventory needs just 2 components:

Players can place items into the space, picking up, re-arranging, and sorting items as they please. In Dredge, our space is a grid.

At its root, spatial inventories are supposed to add decision points for players. Items have to be weighed up against