Game Foundation Tutorials

Creating an Inventory Item Definition

You may want to create items for your game, that the user can collect, create, trade, use, etc. In Game Foundation, items are instances created from an Inventory Item Definition. This definition contains all the static data the instance can refer to, as a description of its type.

Open the Inventory Window

In order to create an Inventory Item Definition, you need to open the Inventory Window. Open the Inventory Window by selecting Window → Game Foundation → Inventory.
You may see the following window.

The window contains two tabs: Inventory Items, and Categories. Let's focus on the Inventory Items tab first.

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 an id automatically. Of course, you can also choose to define your own id.

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 id is now read-only.

You now can see two additional sections below the General section: Categories and Detail Definitions.

Attach a category to your item definition

The Categories section is an intuitive widget to link the selection definition to a category.

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

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

The Categories tab

The Categories tab is a categories manager. It allows you to modify the display name of a category, but also create and remove categories, in a similar way that you create and remove an item definition.

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