Gloomwood has a pretty cool inventory bag
Case study.
Gloomwood is a promising survival horror / immersive sim I've been tracking in the back of my mind for a while now - and now I've seen its inventory I'm even more excited.
I know, it's just an inventory! But it's pretty clever - and not just in an aesthetic way, either. The doctor's bag is a functional object you place down on the ground to use, and it lets you drag objects you find inside and outside of it for immediate storage and use.
In the video below, we see how this works. The player takes a piece of cheese out of the bag and chucks it at a window, distracting the enemy.
Objects you drag into your bag take up item slots in the Resident Evil inventory style, so there's inventory management to think about. And another cool thing is flipping the shelf inside of the bag displays your equipped items, as well as your keys and gold.
As developer Dillon Rogers explained on Twitter, there are some interesting uses of this inventory system. "You can unload a revolver, take the bullets out and throw it to distract enemies," Rodgers said. "It's going to be *sick* seeing what people do with this."
In the video below, Rodgers and co-developer David Szymanski discuss the inspiration and creation of Gloomwood's doctor's bag. It's pretty interesting! The pair talk about taking inspiration from Resident Evil 4's attache case and Arx Fatalis' inventory, which lets you can drag items inside and out of the game world.
Gloomwood is one to watch. There's a demo you can play now on Steam.