Collectables
High-Level Overview: A five-tier resource system tracking player currency, progression gating items, mastery rewards and secret lore objects. Collectables guide environmental traversal and reward deep exploration. Each tier has exactly one source and one sink, so the player always knows what a pickup is for.
Collectable Classification
| Collectable | Primary Source | Inventory Function | Primary Sink / Reward Path |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💰 Sand Dollars | Dynamic world trails and level pathways. | Common spatial currency and structural guide. | Regional Hat Stalls and Level Hat Rugs. |
| 🦪 Pearls | Hidden environmental Clam Shells (5 per zone). | Coloured regional progression markers. | Unlocking conditional access to Systems - Elder Trials. |
| 🏺 Artifacts | Highly hidden secret world alcoves. | Narrative world-building and lore expansion. | Stored and displayed inside NPC - Mortimer Mole's Museum. |
| 🏅 Medals | NPC - Sergeant Sky's Elder Trial completions (max 3 per trial). | High-tier mastery performance metric. | Rare-tier headwear at NPC - Hootsworth's Flagship Store. |
| 🎟️ Golden Tickets | Completing mini-games for NPC - Minigame Mills. | Carnival currency and completion metric. | Exclusive cosmetics at the Flagship Store and Mills' hub-world Travelling Mart. |
How the five tiers relate
Each tier is earned by a different kind of play, which is the point of having five:
- Sand Dollars reward moving well. Found by following the path.
- Pearls reward looking. Found by leaving the path.
- Artifacts reward looking hard. Found by leaving the path and being wrong several times first.
- Medals reward executing. Earned in Systems - Elder Trials.
- Golden Tickets reward playing along. Earned in Systems - Mini Games.
Sand Dollars are the volume currency: spent constantly, earned constantly. Medals and Golden Tickets are prestige currencies: rare, non-fungible, and each tied to one NPC's content. Keep them non-convertible; the moment Sand Dollars can buy a Medal, both economies collapse into one.
Trailing and Behaviour Variants
Collectables are the primary visual layout tool used to communicate intended momentum paths, highlight safe landing spots, and lead players through tricky platforming setups without explicit tutorial text.
One-At-A-Time Collectables: The baseline follow-the-trail script. Collecting the active pickup instantly spawns the next one a short distance ahead, mapping an incremental path forward.
Countdown Collectables: A time-attack variant. These emit a bright glow and gradually fade from the map if the player does not complete the pickup loop within a precise window.
Race Track Collectables: Linear, long-form path layouts built for the high-speed moves: Koopa's roll and Kiko's chained air dashes.
Moving Collectables: Pickups that float, slide, drift or bounce along a predictable path, forcing precisely timed jumps or mid-platforming positioning adjustments.
Implementation Breakdown
Persistence: how a pickup is remembered
Every placed collectable carries a baked, level-unique id. Once taken, it never comes back: the save records the id, and the pickup checks that record when the level loads.
- Ids are baked by an editor tool (Collectables ▸ Bake Ids), never hand-edited, because duplicate ids collect each other.
- An id of 0 marks a runtime spawn (an enemy drop, crate contents). Those still pay out but are never recorded: a pickup that did not exist until this session has no identity a save can refer to. What persists instead is the thing that spawned it.
- The wallet is stored, not recomputed from what has been found. Spending has to be representable, so a pickup restored as "already taken" must be hidden without re-crediting it.
- Found-sets are per level, so a "replay level" option can wipe one level's pickups while leaving the wallet banked.
Presentation
- Ground hover. Every pickup settles to a uniform height above the first ground beneath it, so placement sloppiness never shows. A pickup left clearly up in the air visibly falls to that height rather than hovering where it was dropped.
- Idle bob and spin, bobbing only upward from rest so the ground clearance is never reduced.
- Spawn pop. Enemy drops scale and spin into place before normal bobbing resumes.
- Magnet. An optional component makes a pickup fly to a nearby player.
- Collect flourish on pickup.
Clams
A Clam is a crackable container: the Pearl inside is a child pickup, switched off until the shell cracks. The turtle cracks a clam with a slam, spin or torpedo. A clam whose pearl was taken in a previous session loads pre-cracked and empty rather than replaying the crack; a clam cracked but not looted closes again next session with its pearl still inside.
Where counts are displayed
- HUD: live counters, top-left.
- Pause menu Journal: one row per collectable kind, with the level's denominators.
- Save slot picker: per-slot totals on the front-end setup screen.
Related
- Systems - Artifacts · Systems - Elder Trials · Systems - Mini Games · Systems - Hats
- Systems - Quests: quest objectives are expressed in collectable fractions
- Systems - Enemy AI Framework: enemies drop pickups on death