yea im stealing bushido's game. basically jack and casie is cool and innovative but i played it once and i kinda didn't like how the game played. the inventory is its own physical game space but it's not actually explored in the game and instead all items just have size and you use them to deal damage to an enemy's health bar which i think is kinda dumb and the most depth the game has comes from the weaknesses and the armor system.
im designing my own version of jack and casie where instead of what it is now it's more of a deck building game. enemies have their own inventory with their own items, and you have your inventory with your items. rather than dealing damage to a health bar, you use your items to deal damage to the enemy's items. enemies deal damage in set slow telegraphed patterns that attack a portion of your inventory. you gotta move your items around in the inventory to dodge their attacks with the added difficulty that you can't drag items over each other. and when you attack enemies you basically want to do the same thing: like use a line attack that will hit multiple items.
surface level its basically a ripoff of jack and casie but in the most abstract form its basically real-time into the breach. its not a typical 'real time strategy' but you're strategically moving your items in real time and using them to attack enemy's items which also move in real time so i'd consider it more of an abstract rts. i figured if you're going to make inventory tetris you need to fully utilize the game's space and capture the difficulty of binpacking items in a confined space while your items are actively being attacked
so in this example i got hella daggers and that red rectangle is basically an enemy attack that will happen in a few seconds and in that time i gotta move my daggers outta its range in order to prevent them from being destroyed for the rest of the battle. in that case i can't save the top one because of how obstructive the item's size is. the stuff on the right is just placeholder enemy items.
in this example im using my dagger's ability to target the enemy's items. the dagger (a placeholder item) targets a single enemy item and destroys it in a few seconds which is helpful for directly attacking more powerful enemy items. the downside is that it has a single use and is destroyed for the fight when you use it. i could add items that also do damage in shape patterns (like the red rectangle) and add in special items that allow you to move the enemy's items yourself in order to line them up for some nasty combos.
the idea is that i want to make better use of jack and casie's systems. items that are bigger are harder to use in this game compared to jack and casie because their large size makes them obstructive especially since you can't move items through each other. i can also add things like adjacency bonuses which would incentivize players to clump certain items together at the tradeoff of having to scatter them around when an attack comes near. maybe even with this system i could add some sort of factorio esque open ended puzzle system where you have to build special items using the space all the while enemy attacks are threatening your delicate setup.
its basically like into the breach or xcom in an abstract form and in real time. bushido probably hates me by now but i think j&c is more of a casual happy go lucky artistic game while the game i'm trying to make is slightly less casual and more mechanics focused with less room for error