I’ve never really stopped to think about how you’d make an entire game about backpacks before, probably because they’re always there, in every RPG, and they’re already a kind of game in themselves as you try to fit everything in. But how do you take that idea and spin it out into something big enough to fill a game in its own right?
Backpack HeroDevelopers: Jaspel, GangsRobin, NedoKotent, BinaryCounterPublisher: Jaspel, IndieArkPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now in Early Access on Steam and Itch for roughly £13.50. There’s a free demo on both sites.
Backpack Hero has attempted an answer, and the answer here is ‘make it a bit like a deck-building game’, but there’s some magic in there too. There’s combat, which I didn’t necessarily expect, and the way you engage with it is by putting things in your bag, or selecting things in your bag to use. Let’s say you have a sword in there: if you click on it in battle, you’ll use it. Let’s say you have a shield in there: if you click it in battle, you’ll add armour. This is how you attack and defend against enemies.
The more complicated bit, which it took me a while to work out, are carvings. My frog character has these but the standard rat character doesn’t. Carvings behave a lot like cards in a deck: a selection are drawn each round and you summon (play) them into your bag to be used. Let’s say you summon a Daisy Blade sword: it does damage when summoned and then again when activated like a normal weapon. Then it disappears after the battle until summoned again. You can increase your pool of carvings by dragging over new ones when offered them as rewards after battles. You can also remove them at merchants, which again, underlines the deck-building idea.
Where Backpack Hero steps into its own, though, is through the idea of inventory management, and there’s a couple of things going on here. Obviously, there’s space management: you can’t hold something if you don’t have space for it, nor can you summon something if you don’t have space for it. And you can increase the space in your bag when you level up, but the space you add – in my case, as the Frog character – is : normal objects cannot occupy this space but summons can. Therefore, the default grey backpack space, the solid space, becomes very valuable to me.