Guess what I built this week? The hoverbike customization screen!

So this is all horrible programmer art right now - i swear it’ll actually look good in the final game - but its a good foundation for what is going to be a pretty central mechanic in Desert Child.

I wanted customizing your bike to feel really tactile, so you would really feel like you were working on your bike, as opposed to just tweaking numbers in a menu. I really love the Forza games, but the customization in them always boils down to a sterile menu screen where you increase tire softness by .2%

A game that does amazing stuff with customization is Diablo.

Each item or piece of equipment takes up a set number of squares in your inventory, and equipment of the same type will be the same shape, helping you to identify them immediately so you know where you can equip them to.

But the reason this system sticks in my mind is that, being a loot drop game, Diablo sometimes has you finding items that are too high-level for you to use, so you’ll hold onto them. If it had a list-based menu to show your inventory, you would likely just sort these high level items to the bottom of the list and forget about them. BUT, with this grid system, you’ll find a level 10 sword and think “man, I’m level 8, but if I hold onto this sword, I can equip it as soon as I level up and then I’ll FUCKING WRECK SHIT!”

So you then leave that level ten sword in your inventory, and every time you open it up to use a potion or something, there it is, starring at you as if to say “That’s right, you know you want me… I’m right here… all you need is 2 more levels and we can be together… Don’t even think about walking away from this game and making some real friends…”

And that’s why it’s genius. The game’s loot drop system not only teases you with items that are just out of your reach, but literally lets you covet them and make you look at them every few seconds to remind you how awesome it’ll be if you JUST. KEEP. PLAYING.

Every time I play a game with a list-based menu, I just think man, I wish this was like Diablo. Even just the act of physically moving items around yourself gives weight to them, and draws you into the world.

Granted, some people might find these kinds of systems tedious and too time consuming, and I’m not saying they work in every game. The reason they work in Diablo, and the reason I’m doing something similar in Desert Child, is that, without them Diablo very quickly devolves into a numbers game. All the lore, art, animation, all of it just melts away as you scroll through lists looking to min/max your character sheet. This is why I can’t stand the borderland’s inventory. I just look at equipment as a bunch of numbers and stats without the tangibility of an good inventory system.

For Desert Child, I want the player to feel like they’re solving the puzzle of how to build a hoverbike. I want them to feel ownership over the layout of their engine. Sure, it’s not actually anything like how a real mechanic would build a bike, but its an abstraction that gives that same feeling of accomplishment and pride.

How it all works is that you snap different parts to your bike’s grid, then you wire those parts up to the main engine using Power Cells. This creates a quasi-puzzle mechanic, as the more power cells you have on the grid, the more power you give to your parts, but then the less space you’ll have for those parts on the bike’s grid.

I like the idea of wiring a system together using the very resource you need to power it. It feels kinda intuitive to me.

Another game that I’m influenced by (see: ripping off) is Danball Senki. It’s a Japanese monster-battling game where instead of collecting monsters, you collect robot parts and build your own robot.

It gets pretty stats-heavy at times, but it all ends up making sense (even if you don’t read Japanese) because of the way they define parts as being physical things that you’re locking onto your little robot.

If you compare this to the games obvious inspirations, Medabots and Custom Robo, you really start to see how much more the developers understood the importance of grounding these abstract numbers games into something people could visualize and comprehend.

Even then, Danball Senki still suffers a bit from “list syndrome”, with the endgame making you wade through list upon list of the hundreds of parts you’ve collected.

Desert Child isn’t a loot game, though. Every part in the game has been carefully crafted and designed to fill a specific role in the story. You don’t get duplicates you have to sell, and the game tells you from the get-go which parts you have and which are still out there to find.

I think this solves the problem of the player feeling obligated to constantly reshuffle their loadout every time they get a new item. I’d rather excite the player into customizing their bike, rather than obligate them to to so.

Well, I’ve lectured long enough without saying much. I’ll stop now.

I know I said this devlog was going to be about Music, but I really don’t think these things through before I commit to them. So music will come at some point, I just spent the week doing this instead.

Thanks for reading!