Game Foundation Tutorials

Creating an Inventory Item Definition

You may want to create in-game resources for your game, that the user can earn, purchase or consume. Using the inventory system provided by Game Foundation, you can easily create such a system for your game.

Inventory items are instances created from an Inventory Item Definition. This definition serves like a schema or blueprint that contains all the static data the instance can refer to, as a description of its type.

So first let's take a look how we can create such a definition for your in-game items.

Open the Inventory Window

In order to create an Inventory Item Definition, open the Inventory Window by selecting Window → Game Foundation → Inventory.

You may see the following window:

The layout shows the first section, on the left (emphasised with a green box in the screenshot). This section shows the list of definitions you've already created. For the moment, you have none, so let's create one.

Create a new item definition

At the bottom of this section, you can see a large + button. It's the one you'll click on to start creating a new definition. Click on it now.

The right side of the layout is now updated and shows a simple form.

You can focus on giving your definition a display name. The UI will convert this display name into a key automatically. Of course, you can also choose to define your own key.

This display name is used by the editor itself, but you can use it inside your game too.

When done, click on the Create button on the bottom right-hand corner of the section.

Configure your item definition

With the item "My First Item" selected on the left, you now can see the full configuration form displayed on the right-hand side of the window.

You still have the possibility to modify the display name of the item definition, but the key is now read-only.

You now can see three additional sections below the General section: Tags, Mutable Properties, and Static Properties.

Attach a tag to your item definition

The Tags section is an intuitive widget to link the selection definition to a tag.

You can type a tag name directly in the search field.
If the tag already exists, a list will appear, showing tags matching with the characters you've already typed. If the tag you've typed doesn't exist, you can click the Add button to create the tag and assign it to the definition right away.

You can also unassign a tag by clicking on the - button next to it.

Go to the next tutorial to see what we can do with this item definitions.