The Game Feature I Keep Redesigning (And Why I Keep Getting It Wrong)

I have a love-hate relationship with inventory systems. Not with games' inventory systems — with my own. Every time I start a new project, I swear I'll build something elegant. Clean. Intuitive. And every time, by the third iteration, I'm staring at the same pile of design decisions I've already made twice before and somehow still got wrong. This is the story of my inventory system, and what it taught me about scope creep in game design. Version One: The Naive Stack The first version was simple.