Epsilon Update No. 9: Inventory
The next monthly update about Epsilon — a solo adventure game about exploring a dark and corrupting forest. Carrying items in the EZ.
As the launch of Exclusion Zone Botanist: Epsilon approaches, I’ll be posting regular updates with a behind-the-scenes look at the design decisions going into the game:
Epsilon Update 01: Epsilon overview
Epsilon Update 02: Plant features
Epsilon Update 03: Plant morphology
Epsilon Update 04: Exclusion Zone map
Epsilon Update 05: Character creation
Epsilon Update 06: Playtesting
Epsilon Update 07: SHX system
Epsilon Update 08: Bloom
Note that everything here is in development and subject to change. These updates are a snapshot of how things looked when they were written.
Follow the Kickstarter pre-launch page to be notified when it goes live!
The inventory challenge
In the original Exclusion Zone Botanist, there is no inventory system. You begin the game with “a couple of chem lights, rations, first aid kit, and a Bureau issued HX-40 pistol that you’ve never fired.” Beyond those items, you have your sketchbook and pens. Nothing is ever gained or lost during your incursion into the EZ.
I want Epsilon to have an inventory system. To me, the ability to customize the items you carry is just as much a part of character creation as is choosing your background and skills. Finding new items and occasionally losing some of them needs to be part of the game.
In the Epsilon version that was playtested at Unpub, players had a basically unlimited inventory. New agents began the game with eight items including a notebook, chronometer, food, water, backpack, paper map, analog compass, first aid kit, and chem lamp. There was also D66 table to gain additional starting items to add to your inventory. Even more items were acquired via events while exploring the EZ.
While I liked the immersiveness (and perhaps simulationist vibes) of it, it slowed down the game in a suboptimal way. This showed up in the playtest feedback as I noted in my post-test write-up:
Too many ways to gain items and no way to lose items. Players didn’t love having to search through a long list of items to see if they applied to the current challenge. Based on watching how players interacted with each part of the game, the equipment wasn’t as engaging as the exploration and drawing.
It should have been no surprise that people play Exclusion Zone Botanist and Epsilon for the exploration, drawing, and push-your-luck zonecore tension. Adding an inventory system that makes players stop those activities to search through a list runs counter to the goals of the game.
Keep it simple
Epsilon’s inventory system is now streamlined in a way that lets the best parts of the game shine. The starting equipment is still there, but abstracted away. If you think you’d reasonably have an item that would help in a specific challenge, give yourself a +1 to the SHX system roll. We don’t need to list everything out.
Yet some item specificity is necessary. Therefore, special items that are acquired along the way will go into your inventory, but with a much smaller fixed capacity. You can carry four items with you at any time.
I’m also continuing to revise many of the encounters and challenges so that they consume items. Previously the game would continually give agents new items but never remove any. Balancing that will be a big improvement and is aligned with simplifying the gameplay.
Epsilon is the largest project I’ve worked on so far. Scope creep and the desire to include every fun idea is a constant risk and battle.
Of course I want to have it be a deeper game, but inventory is a good example of the need to focus on the core promise of the game: deep exploration and discovery with constant time pressure.
Follow the Epsilon project
I am posting an Epsilon update on the third Friday of every month through development, launch, and fulfillment. You can read previous updates in the Exeunt Omnes archive.
What do you think? Have you played a solo game where the inventory system got in the way of the best parts of the game? Let me know in the comments.
- E.P. 💀
P.S. If you love tabletop games, you should check out Tumulus. It’s a print-only, quarterly zine packed with game design content and creative inspiration.
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“If you think you’d reasonably have an item that would help in a specific challenge, give yourself a +1 to the SHX system roll.”
Here are two approaches to that (there are surely more):
1. I am sure I would have *something* that would help — although I don’t know just what it would be. [Takes the +1 and thinks no more about it.]
2. We all come into the field with a Swiss army knife, and by sacrificing it by wedging it into the rock just so, I disarm the trap. [Adds diagram and notes beneath latest botanical drawing.]
Would it be right to say that one of these pushes one out of the fiction and the other pulls one in?
If one would *obviously* have the thing that would *obviously* help, that would be built into the Challenge Rating, right? My hiking boots don’t give me +1 to walking up the hill, but if I use their laces to muzzle a crocodile, then … ;)