“Yumfruit, Eye Candy, Blockolate! You want it? It’s yours, my friend! As long as you have enough Funny Hunny.”
Monochrome Shopping Spree!
Every RPG needs a bunch of shops to purchase items that help the player on their quests! The Monochrome RPG just got their first one this week! ORK once again makes this super easy, so lets hop right into it!
Stocking the Shelves
First we need to define the layout of the shop on the screen. ORK has a tab for this exact purpose. We can setup how each choice will be displayed and what text will be shown detailing each item.
Next we need to setup the shop itself. ORK has a tab for that too! We can let the shop know what items it will sell and for how much. We can also set the currency the shop uses for its prices. Speaking of prices, what’s the currency being used for the Monochrome RPG?
Currency Printer Go Brrrr
Multiple currencies can be defined in ORK and this is good for us as we will have different types that can be dropped in different areas. The few we have set right now Funny Hunny, BeauBow, and Silly Sing. They will be dropped by various enemy types for defeating them in bouts.
In ORK we can set the name, icon, and wait, that’s about it…
Why are there no other settings? Well it seems ORK doesn’t handle having multiple currencies very well. If you see in the Shop section, when selling an item it is given a price. But the price is simply just a value, and has no currency associated with it. What ORK does is use the first currency by default! That’s not good! So how do we change this?
With the shop itself! When creating a shop, you must say what currency it uses. This currency is then used as the currency for all of the item prices. That’s not so bad, until I realized this means you cant have a shop that sells multiple items for different currencies.
At this point it almost seems like nothing is going right. And that is correct, I spent a while trying to get this all to work how we wanted it. But after all this perseverance, we now have a brand new Currency Exchange System to help us!
The Next Big Crypto
This system allows the player to Exchange currency they don’t need for currency they do need! This should allow us to have many different areas that drop their own currency and have their own shops, but still letting each currency be useful everywhere. You’ll never guess how it works; Crafting!
Yep, crafting. That’s how we exchange currencies. ORK didn’t make it easy for me so I found another way. With Crafting the player can be given a recipe, which is actually just an exchange, and this recipe can take in one currency and return a different one. I just needed to make a recipe for each possible exchange.
In the menu, after picking a recipe, the player will be prompted with a window that shows which currency will be exchanged for which. Currently this exchange menu is accessed from the menu that also houses inventory and troupe management. This might change to make it not always accessible, but it works for now.
Stay Tuned For…
Gazer! He will be joining Otto on his adventure and I might be working on his implementation over the weeks to come. The shop will be needing some tweaks as well as this currency system so I have no doubt I will be pretty busy this week.
Always Challenge Past Designs (For Innovation’s Sake)
I have pretty much been raised by this in my journey through Drexel as a game design major. I think it can very well lead to some awesome innovation! It is easy to fall into the trap of familiarity because well… “It’s what we have always done”. I recently watched a great video of a channel that looks this way at many mechanics that games use. This one happens to be about critical hits and I found it very enjoyable. I hope you do as well!