A little difficult to have a game that heavily features looting - without having an inventory to buy, sell, upgrade and equip that loot! So the last month has been mostly spent making an interactive inventory system.
The system is fairly simple, sell loot at campfires for XP, then upgrade your stats so that you can equip and wear better combinations of the weapons and armour that you have looted!
The game features a rather classic RPG attributes system of STR, DEX, CON, etc as well as two career paths, of High Knight Noble and Low Knight Errant, which increase the player's wearable AP stat. The High Path costs more XP whilst increasing Rage Bar buffs - when critical strikes in battle negate enemy defence and massively increase damage - whilst the Low Path allows for quicker AP increases for far less Rage buffing. No more running about in your underpants once you unlock an armour type.
STR and DEX stats allow ever increasing weapon equipment, whilst CON is HP and STA allows for more sprinting, dodging, jumping, and heavy attacks. There is also ATH(letics) for faster running and further jumping and dodging. All very classic RPG style statistics and behaviours that any gamer (video or tabletop) would recognize - to the extent that I've only used the 3 letter abbreviations for the names (except ATHlectics which could equally be called AGIlity).
Whilst I might keep saying "simple" in this blogpost, actually getting the inventory working was a huge mix of trial and error (especially with gamepad only usage) and took the whole month of development.
And here it is in video action!
With the player now able to loot and gain XP from it, and spend that XP to enhance and equip their character, the next big development milestone is to allow interaction with the NPC warbands. Whilst the various factions happily play the game all by themselves that is not particularly interesting for the squidgy humanoid sat behind the screen - so next up is making friends and enemies of the roaming NPC raiders! And after that, it's sorting out a page on the Steam Store for early access release! (which looks like it will be after the summer sale with the vetting time).
