So, here's the scenario: I'm building an RPG. Like most of the other RPGs on the market, my game will feature an inventory and of course, inventory items. So far I've worked well with using a single class for all items, because I did not need anything else than character stat alteration on item usage (consumption). However, I'd like some items to have a more exotic effect. Think of something like when the user consumes a transformation potion, he automatically turns into a beast.

In order to achieve this I've thought about declaring a new class that inherits from BaseItem for each item. Each descendant would override some methods (like void OnConsume()), to change the base behavior.

This works fine, but when it comes to inventory management, I have some issues. The actual inventory will have to work with BaseItem components only (for obvious reasons, as it's an enumerable collection of objects of the same type); casting any descendant to the base class is possible, so no problems in adding items to the inventory. But how can I keep track of the descendant's type (class) for each item in the inventory? And how to perform the descendant's OnConsume from withint he inventory, for each item?

Let me know if you can think of a better solution than mine, or if you can think of a solution to my problem only.

Development is done in C#, inside Unity 3.5.

Thanks!