computer games forum

It's a while since I played the Atelier series (I know there are on Steam now, but... no time ).
My question is this: you have a recipe displayed on screen and want to craft. As you craft stuff, ingredients are consumed, so maybe you have everything except "Coal".
Now Coal is probably easy enough to remember, but I wonder: it's normal to close the crafting/recipes screen, then go in the shop, look for the missing item and buy it?

I am used to MMORPG, where you can just click on the missing ingredient directly from the recipe screen, and you are shown a screen with the items on sale in the various available vendors, even with prices displayed. This system is 100% more fast and user friendly but I suspect the poor Anima might kill me if I asked such feature (uhm actually I already asked for it ).

But seems an essential feature to me. How it works in the Atelier or other crafting games? is normal to wander around looking for the missing ingredients in the shops?

Atelier are gathering games. If you need a specific ingredient, you open the encyclopedia, it tells you where the item can be found, you travel there and beat up the monsters or use the gathering points until you find the item. Some ordinary items can be found in shops, and those are usually found where it makes sense, metals at the smith, vegetables at the greengrocer, etc. There's usually one "exotic" merchant, who carries a bit of everything, but other than that, you go where you'd expect to find to find the right type of ingredient.

Ahh yes now I remember!! That's why it wasn't super grinding to do it (well except the actual fights).
OK, I think for Amber my idea would be the best, otherwise I think could be a bit frustrating to play

On a related note: something I've been meaning to ask--w/ the tools used for crafting figurines and such are they one-time-only kinds of things?

I ask since in some of the recipes in other threads it will have them listed as ingredients (ex.: Basic Tools (1) ) and therefore can't tell if after being used in a single recipe they disappear.

jack1974 wrote:Ahh yes now I remember!! That's why it wasn't super grinding to do it (well except the actual fights).
OK, I think for Amber my idea would be the best, otherwise I think could be a bit frustrating to play

Yeah, I think your system will work better (will have to try and see), especially because it's more of a menu-based game. The Atelier games (at least the ones I've played) you're actually walking around the world to interact with more things. Here you'd just be flipping back and forth through five different menus to leave the house, go to town, visit some shop, leave that shop, go back home, go back to your crafting lab and if you're doing that a few hundred times it'll damage your mouse.

BobTheMob wrote:On a related note: something I've been meaning to ask--w/ the tools used for crafting figurines and such are they one-time-only kinds of things?

I ask since in some of the recipes in other threads it will have them listed as ingredients (ex.: Basic Tools (1) ) and therefore can't tell if after being used in a single recipe they disappear.

No some items don't break/are consumed afterwards, like those tools. You need for the recipe but they remain in your inventory

Troyen wrote:Yeah, I think your system will work better (will have to try and see), especially because it's more of a menu-based game

Yes, there are some places to visit and other things to do but the main difference is the combat, and the fact that there are a lot of ingredients and shops can have many as well. Well also right now the items/vendor items sorting doesn't work, so maybe it's also that the problem.
But still having an automated system would be much better and avoid a lot of meaningless clicking.

Gathering screen done
Things left to do for the beta:
1) sorting inventory items
2) fixing vendor screen
3) adding the new tasks screen (this last one could even be optional since I half-coded something myself and could try to integrate with some existing code)