Ooooh, it's the hamster dance!!!

Where's the Maxim shot?

Very nice. How is the inventory handled? You could have a pretty nice system going if the player actually sees what he's wearing on the actual character. Diablo 2 comes to mind.

It's coming along very nicely. Well done.

We don't have a fine-grained visual representation.

In short, Morning has two looks, dress/armor.

doing fine grained visual representation in 2D requires large amounts of ram, and requires special preperations of 'overlays'.

to throw some simple stats out:

morning currently has 7 actions:

idle,move,talk,emo,die,cast,attack

each of which is a 1024x1024 image, 32 bpp, 128x128 frame size, 8x8 frames. so under current conditions, a single action map is about 4 MB, so, each 'look' requires all 7 action maps, so thats 28 MB per action. each item potentialy has to support the motions for each action (there are some exclusions but they get tricky), so that means, each wearable item (crown, armor, etc.) is also 28 MB, asuming that morning could wear...

armor,weapon,helm,boots,gloves,shield

that is the base character, at 28 MB plus, each item's 28 MB

so that is 28+6*28 = 196MB of graphical data,
where are you going to fit that on the card? =D

you could composite everything into a single set of sheets, but this can cause slow equipment change times, due to loading images from disk, compositing the data, and pushing it down to the card.

and that is JUST for one complete outfit.


So, faced with this we decided not to allow for the common RPG stuff, and instead, focused mainly on magical items, most of which are pointless in seeing on your person, such as.

L Ring, R Ring,L Bracelet, R Bracelet,Crown,Amulet

Crown is the worst of all these, and perhaps If I had it to do over again, I would have made rings the only type of equipable item in-game, and simply give them a wide set of diverse powers.

So in summary, dynamic fine-grained visual representation in 2D sprite-based games, is not a good decision, unless you have almost no character animation, and very few actions.

=D

How is it handled in games like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Diablo 2, etc?

Don't get me wrong, it is, DOABLE, but it results in a few things.

-Potentialy Lower Quality Graphics 16bit or even 8bit
-TONS of work for artists (creating overlays is a pain)
-Large HDD and VRAM costs
-Unrealistic visual representations (my armor doesn't really look like that), due to only a few overlays for basic item classifications.

For us, it was mainly the large HDD(we are going the route of online download) and the TONS of work for artists.

also, given that MW is an Adventure game with RPG concepts, versues a RPG with Adventure game concepts, it would end up being a LOT of work with very little gain, better to pour that time into gameplay, IMHO. =)