So I've got a bit of a selfish reason for making this post aside from starting an autistic debate about the back end of RPGs again. I'm just playing around right now with learning inventory mechanics and learning them.
Every time I look at grid inventories, yes they're sometimes quite nice visually laid out and everything and it lets you sort stuff well as the player when they're coded properly. At the same time though from the player's perspective I have never really cared much about grid vs list I played the hell out of Skyrim and Fallout 4 and I actually quite enjoy the list inventories because you can quickly scroll down clicky click your way through stuff and you're done whereas with grids you're dragging and dropping things constantly and having to split items in a fairly tedious way.
My main point with this ramble is though thinking about inventory design does anybody here actually care that much about what the inventory screen looks like if it's clean and usable? I bring this up because if I choose to code a list over a grid in my projects that have inventory systems it's a remarkable difference in the work load, lists are definitely easier to deal with and take less code compared to complicated grid systems if all you want to do is let people pick up and drop stuff or equip things and there's not much else going on.
For extreme examples, think Skyrim vs Diablo 2 in terms of how they have their inventories. Been fed up of bloated RPG after bloated RPG being released so I'm going to play around with these ideas for the lulz while I think about my other work now my RL garden stuff is calming down.
Well as an example of what I'm thinking of with weight etc. in inventory systems. Something I would do with my design is have booleans that keep track of specific quest/side quest related items. Instead of this nonsense where you have books/keys or other crap clogging up your inventory just pick them up and have a boolean set off that tells you whether you've picked up an item related to a certain quest.
Yes it's 'unrealistic' compared to how other games do it, but inventory management has always been a pain in the arse for me. I would then have it where you only have to worry about dealing with relevant items then and you can clear out and sell your inventory properly because you know nothing's vital for you to progress the story or anything like that which is a very big problem you have to deal with even with modern titles.
Yes I know about the arrays, but honestly in terms of UI design and especially the drag and drop, just seems easier to me to dump a list of items into a scrollable list and have everything work that way rather than fiddling around with grids compared to the agony of drag and drop code. This is me obviously justifying getting out of working on a grid system partially but it really is the case I feel when I keep working through the code in my head that list based stuff is easier to work with.
I suppose really the key is just experimentation and seeing if it works.