#09 ~ Inventory Management

So I've been working on an inventory system now that the animation engine is performant.

It's cute and it works great. I'll  be able to create layered looks and coherent outfits for my people's.

The biggest challenge with something like this is that it's so custom, so dependent on the game mechanics there, e.g. I've added Earrings but have no idea what they'll even do. But I think I need them so I coded it.

Throughout this development, I've been mindful of the lessons learnt in Gamemaker, particularly around object reference passing. Whilst I'm happy that GMS does do some object inheritence, etc and you can create structs and pass them around, the actual mechanism there isn't transparent, like it would be in C++/C# or any other professional language.

In that, my own background in enterprise software hasn't helped, it was a discipline drilled into me over the years to be super mindful around reference errors, memory management etc and GMS simply doesn't show it's working there. I regularly find myself thinking, "I bet that's a sync operation between threads" only to discover it was nothing of the sort and I was coding based on an assumption.

Anyways, Gamemaker :)

Still better than writing a game engine from scratch.