So I have been playing Hexxit with my wife and kids and I'm noticing something. For those of you who aren't familiar with Hexxit it is part of a mod package for Minecraft which comes with the Technic launcher. Anyway back to my point, I have a tendency towards hoarding inside of video games, especially MMOs. I realized that I have been spending hours creating chests and organizing the vast amount of stuff inside of the game. I have noticed that I have this tendency in other games I play as well, games like Firefall and Aion. In Firefall the inventory is an endless black hole that I can throw whatever into, which is nice in that I don't have to worry about space but very confusing when looking for something in particular. In Aion I was forever running out of space for the myriad of items to be found, and finding where I put something could be very annoying as I would have to switch characters and do item juggling just to get the items in the right place. Even with the difficulties that arise I still find myself justifying keeping every little thing since it may be useful eventually, right?
It is clear that people like stuff, even virtual stuff. According to this New York Times article, virtual goods are worth billions of dollars, and this was back in 2010. That is a lot of money for items that aren't really there. So the question I have is how many items should there be in a game that I create? In the case of a Minecraft like game there needs to be both a 2D sprite of the object to go into the player's inventory, and usually a 3D representation of the object. A player inventory implies a multi-level database, as you have the inventory that the player is holding at the moment and more long term storage at the base. I'm going to learn a bit more about databases this coming semester, and I'm hoping to puzzle out a little of how I'm going to organize this project. But one thing is clear at least to me, more is not necessarily better. I think that keeping things to a minimum in the number of things department would be a good thing. I'll have to think more on this later though as I still need to get the basic mechanics of the world figured out first.
