Posted October 18, 2025 by AguynamedDan
It's been more than a week since my last devlog because my family was visiting from out of town (damn them), but the Dodgers beat the Phillies due to a stunning 9th inning error and went on to sweep the Brewers in the NCLS and are on their way to their second consecutive World Series!
Also, my game has an in-game store now:
Yes, this is another post from the land of a thousand menus. The good news is that I'm getting much better at them and this one has all sorts of nice tricks like invalidating the yes button when you have insufficient coins, full health in the case of a health potion, and full armor in the case of armor. If you are able to buy the health pendant for 120 coins, tell me how you were able to do that. But you will also be disappointed because all it does is give you a full heal. That will be incorporated once I have my inventory and pendant system (buffs) set up.
The shop will appear once the switch is pulled in room 1-11, which used to be the end of the demo. I guess that this means that my game has an "economy" now? I am trying to think through how to best incorporate that. I've gotten feedback from people who think that losing all accumulated coins on death is unfair, which is valid and I only put that in there because the demo was super short and there was nothing to actually spend coins on. But I'm worried about characterizing losing coins on death too much, if that makes sense. I feel like it's corny to critique Capitalism in a fantasy setting for reasons that I will absolutely not elaborate on here. Since my game yammers on about a King who abuses his power to build a gigantic dungeon, I'm worried that having a system where you, like, pay death half of your money to respawn, it will distract from the story that I'm actually telling by getting people thinking political thoughts and then making them pay to live.
Unfortunately, I can't really rely on my old reliable technique of just ripping off Zelda because the Hyrulian economy is completely bogus. Dark Souls also doesn't give a great idea because souls are essentially an infinite grindable resource and my game doesn't have bonfires to prompt a full level reset, and I don't really want it to have them either. I kind of just want the reasoning to be "it's a game and of course you lose coins when you die", but . Let me know if you have any ideas?
Thanks!