A simple suggestion that I think would streamline things is to include an item comparison function. When hovering over an item (either on your mule or in a shop) have the stats and cards of currently equipped items pop-up for easy comparison. This is not a significant change but as I said it will streamline looking at and comparing loot which is a large part of that game. Thanks for listening!
Sounds fine, but which ones would you like to have pop up? Remember that a Wizard character can have 4 Arcane Items with three cards each, while a Warrior character can have 3 Weapons with six cards each. It would be an overwhelming display on many monitors. At present, you can compare directly by hovering an item on your cursor over an item on your character, which already takes up the entire screen on some resolutions. Yes, one could argue that images should scale, but now the code is getting even more complicated (and scaling is very ugly in Flash--as discussed in various "bug" threads).
One suggestion would be to allow the player to "mark" the equipment found in shops. Therefore one could easily see which ones they classify as 'must-have', 'interesting', 'maybe' and 'junk' - and filter them, so they don't have to hover each and every piece of equipment everytime they go shopping... Cheers!
The ability to mark an item as junk, to be sold in the shop with a single button press, would be a feature that I would appreciate. It's something I made use of a lot in Borderlands 2 and found very handy.
Yep, but since there are so many items in this game, I would go even further and allow a player to mark items they don't own (the ones still sold on shops). I remember once seeing an item that costed around 100 gold and being very interested. When I finally got 100 gold, it was a pain to browse the inventory of each store to finally find it... Cheers!
With multiple items, such as Arcane Items and Weapons, maybe only pop-up one at a time with the ability to cycle through them? Maybe with the left and right arrow keys or since the game can be played with mouse only try some buttons implemented on the pop-up itself that you could click. I don't know much about programming but if scaling is a real issue I say keep it the same and cycling through one item at a time would help with that by keeping less info on the screen. I was unaware of the pop-up if you held the item over that slot, however you could accidentally equip an item by letting go of the mouse button, and if it is an item from the shop then you also have just purchased it. Thanks for your responses.
Good point, I was thinking about marking the items in your inventory rather than marking items in shop (I don't know why after re-reading your first post...). Being able to persistently mark interesting and junk items in the shop sounds like it would be a helpful feature to have. Perhaps you could use some click combination to go into a compare mode. Say you right-click on one of your arcane items. The game sets the shop and inventory filters to that item type and whenever you mouse over another item the comparison with the originally clicked item is shown. Might not work on all screen resolutions though and would probably need some refinement to stop the comparison box blocking the selection of other items.
