Inventory UX Design - How Zelda, Resident Evil, and Doom Make Great Game Menu UX

Shouldn't "user experience" be "UE"?

Moonlighter inventory is broken once you obtain the mimic companion

Do you know something funny about the inventory system? Majora's mask 3DS didn't fix it at all even though it could.
The d-pad had 3 unused buttons and one for the Ocarina. If you know anything about the game you know that there's 3 main masks related to the plot you will be using constantly (Deku, Goron and Zora). Needless to say, the unused buttons could easily fix the chore that item management was in that game.

UX = User Experience

I'm surprised fable III wasn't brought up.

Im an rpg and also a big castlevania down, but alltp and links awakening were hands down has the best inventory ive seen in any game as every item were useful and thought out prettry well.

While the curses in Moonlighter can be challenging, my favorite work around is the Mimic pet. If you put cursed items in it, then the curse doesn't take effect, and when you return home, the curses disappear and you just have a bunch of normal items.

I liked the iterm weight distribution in dragons dogma. Not necessarily it having item weight but more the fact that depending on how much you carry your run speed is affected. And when you carry very little, boii do you run FAST

"...the precision of the joystick..."

Get a load of this guy!

Fun fact: the inventory system which is used in Zelda wind waker Wii u was first used in zelda phantom hourglass.

Pokemon legends arceus has an awful item ux 🥶

I think it's interesting that you consider the guns in Doom to be part of an "inventory." Before watching this video, I would have said that most first person shooters, despite having usable items like grenades, bullets, and sometimes other equipment, do not have an inventory. But really they just don't have an inventory *interface*.

Call of Duty Nazi Zombies takes that concept pretty far, sometimes giving you multiple different ammo types per gun that you can swap between (think M16 grenade launcher attachment), grenades, monkeys, easter egg items (e.g., the film reels you can pick up in Kino Der Toten), and even temporary equips like the minigun.
And they do all of this without any kind of inventory interface, instead relying on context-specific interactions (for example, buying ammo off of the wall is done without a separate interface).

i loved RE4's inventory system so much; not only was it an oddly fun little side-game to make everything fit in an aesthetically pleasing/easy to read way, but it also emphasized item management since you can't stack anything that isn't an herb.
i also love how key items and treasures have their own window, one of the things that could make the recent remakes a little....too frustrating at times, in my opinion.

These videos are so helpful thanks!

I quite like the "tetris" style of inventory based on physical space.

love how dark souls was included in the "just pause everything" section when it very much does not, even in offline mode

Oddly enough, I hate quick wheels, but that's probably because I play on PC. Gimme a list menu any day! Or hotkeys!

Random inventory pro tip: If you're making your game for PC, remember that PC players are more accustomed to menu functions and shortcuts than anyone. Expanding your inventory controls to add functions for right click, shift, and ctrl goes a long way when done well. For the kinds of games where you "select" items before choosing what to do with them, copying shortcuts from Windows explorer is the easiest way to give the player more control. Ctrl to select multiple items, shift to select all items between your currently selected item and the one you clicked, ctrl+A to select all, and so on.

Besides that, if your game is the kind to have your player move items between containers, it's common practice to have right click split stacks, or pick up or put down a single item from a stack. Shift clicking commonly moves whole stacks to the other container instantly. And don't forget to think about what kind of functions you can give holding and dragging! Minecraft, for example, allows you to split the items in your cursor evenly between any empty slots you click and drag between. Similarly, right clicking and dragging deposits 1 item from the stack into every slot you hover over.

Wait, Companions of Xanth was an actual game?! I remember it appearing in the books (I read them as a kid), but didn't know it was real...

The dragon in Skyrim watching me pause time to eat 100 wheels of cheese.

One of the things I appreciated when I played Satisfactory, was the multiple customizable hotbars when building. 10 different hotbars with 10 slots each. Really nice for doing specific tasks, such as mapping a specific hotbar to different types of conveyor belts and another hotbar for fluid pipes. Really made building a lot less tedious, since you didn't have to open the build menu every time you wanted to build something

This one's amazing. Think I'll definitely use the wheel for my game, and might only slow down for menues in the jrpg part, otherwise keep it at regular time.

I really like earthbound's menu, it has nice font, style and sounds.

The most inventive inventory I've encountered is the coinpurse from Kingdom. The coins are physics objects that fall into the UI coinpurse when picked up. That means that the coins can fall out if it overflows, but also that the amount you can carry changes slightly if the coins happen to stack nicely once they get past the top and there are other cool interactions as well. It also encourages you to use the treasury system once you unlock it.

It greatly influenced the UI and mechanics of a 2d survival I've been working on. it's meant to be both grounded and heavily obfuscated in its mechanics. So I try to abstract the mechanics as little as possible, and find intuitive, diegetic ways to provide the player with feedback. Hunger, stamina, and health don't any meters, instead they play sounds, tweak shaders, change animations, make particles, and so on. It also means that I can heavily fudge the behind the scenes stuff to prevent frustration and boredom, without clueing the player in on just how much they're potentially being lied to to help them have fun.
For example, slowing starvation based on location, nearby objects, or predicted behavior. Or slowing drowning if the player is close to air or has a habit of pushing their luck. Or a secret disease that gives the same feedback as starving or dying, even though you're actually totally fine. Giving your stamina a seconds wind at the expense of hunger and eventually health, etc.
I enjoy making these interwoven systems with fun and mysterious quirks. I've even encountered a couple emergent behaviors that were completely unintended.
I ended up having a situation where the player just died out of nowhere and it took my way too long to realize that one of the foods had a buff that, when combined with the disease above, completely prevented the low health feedback from triggering, so you couldn't see that you were actually dying. Reminded me of a few real life things, so I left it in. Oh, and spontaneous combustion. I still haven't figured out what causes it, but it only ever happens when the player is relatively still and not hungry. Like, sometimes if you ate and then slept, you'd wake up and after a few minutes you'd just catch fire for no apparent reason. Somewhere in my math, the temperature must randomly become exponential in some weird edge case, but I have no idea how that's even possible. It is kinda hilarious though, because it doesn't last long enough to kill you on its own. You only die if you start other stuff on fire.

"Equip wheels are a great way to make use of the analog stick's precision"
Me with a crappy 3rd party controller that has an analog stick that only goes 8 ways:

i liked prey inventory

Would've been nice to see a mention of Beyond Good & Evil

I love the dark souls series and Elden Ring has been so amazing but I have found a small problem with the menu, the fact that you can't pause the game is usually something I like but when I can't just ignore a problem outside of the game (i.e. my cat dropping a huge, creamy stinkum on the kitchen floor) it becomes a problem because I'm trying to focus on not dying. It's hard to do that when I'm currently suffocating from the mustard gas filling the room. I don't even want the inventory screen to be a pause menu. I just want a pause button with nothing else on it, just so I can deal with stuff outside of the game.

"the door was a jar"- this is why people stopped playing this games...

im on a UX/UI course currently and my tutor doesn't like that I chose Zelda BOTW as a good example of design. I think i might quit now XD

Sons Of The Forest

Would have liked to see a mention of Dungeon Master when talking about weight management. Every item has a certain weight, and each character has a maximum weight limit determined by their strength stat. When they are carrying close to their limit, moving drains their stamina; above their limit they can’t move at all. The game also used chests to increase the inventory space: you could hold 8 items in a chest and the chest itself only takes 1 slot in your inventory, but you have to hold the chest in your hand to move items in or out of it.

I’m really surprise that you never talk about vagrant story, such a great example for many of your work Doc !

the worst inventory In a game that I have played is every pokemon game.When you collects alot of items it becomes a chore to find them.Shit game design in an already shit franchise

Yo ! Where is the simple guide to inventorys? My first ever made UI looked messy and hard to see, its a rather difficult puzzle at first.
General good art dessign principles still works well. Clean good color combinations, composition, leed the eye with busy detail and keep it smooth and plain for things unimportant.

You can kill the bosses is Doom 2016 easily by shooting the bfg then opening the weapon wheel so it stays on screen longer but still deals the same damage per second while on screen.

I cannot rant enough about how much I hate quick wheels. A columned list would be much faster and easier in most cases.

In Boktai, there is a "decay" system, your recovery item can get spoiled if left in the inventory for too long and even faster it it's exposed to the sun, considering you fight by collecting sunlight to shoot at enemies, you'll eventually have a pocket full of rotten nuts if you're not careful.

This can be mitigated by storing the items in the storage back in town which keeps the freshness level until taken out, there is also usually a "Chocolate" item, like other items, it can spoil but instead of turning into a rotten item, it turns into melted chocolate, keep a chocolate over other items and let it melt and you'll combine them and get a "Chocolate-covered" which has no freshness meter which means it can't spoil. Chocolate-covered restores a very small amount of HP, and gives you back whatever was inside the chocolate covering when used, but you have no way to tell what was inside other than memorizing it

"It made the sailing, one of the more tedious parts of the original game..."

Me: I liked the sailing. I sailed everywhere if I didn't have to warp because I liked it so much.

One great comparison example is The Escapists and its sequel The Escapists 2. In The Escapists, the world is frozen any time you are interacting with an inventory. But this lead to an exploit where while you are being chased by guards, even if they are right behind you, so long as you can open a chest before your knocked out, then you can take your time to stash as many of your items as the chest can hold before what you have left on you is confiscated. In its sequel The Escapists 2, they patched this exploit by making it so that time no longer freezes whenever you’re interacting with an inventory. This means that the amount of time you have to stash items in a chest is completely dependent on your speed and distance from the guards chasing you.

looking through the minecràt inventory and getting blown up by a creeper

I hate wheel menus

I'll put name of referenced games directly into the video like GMTK, easier to find, quick access, and you could make an animation preset to just enter the name of the game