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

This episode features clips from (by order of first appearance): 0:19 Zelda: Ocarina of Time 0:21 Zelda: Wind Waker 0:24 Splatoon 2 0:27 Jack and Casie 0:29 Resident Evil 4 0:31 Moonlighter 0:37 Borderlands 2 0:41 Mass Effect 0:45 Dark Souls 0:54 Mario Maker 2 1:07 Zelda: Breath of the Wild 1:11 Persona 5 1:18 Resident Evil Remake 1:28 Stardew Valley 1:37 Octopath Traveler 2:04 Zork 2:57 Final Fantasy I 3:18 Final Fantasy IX 3:33 Day of the Tentacle 3:40 King's Quest 6 3:44 Putt Putt Travels Through Time 3:51 Kyrandia Book 2 3:56 Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When it's Dark Outside 4:00 Companions of Xanth 4:21 Monkey Island 2 4:36 Doom 5:00 Elder Scrolls: Morrowind 5:10 Elder Scrolls: Arena 5:14 Elder Scrolls: Skyrim 5:51 Dead Space 7:23 Kingdom Hearts 3 7:48 Smash Ultimate 7:57 Horizon Zero Dawn 8:02 Bloodborne 8:25 Dragon Quest XI 8:30 Witcher 3 9:40 Zelda: Majora’s Mask 11:40 Mario Kart 8 11:57 A Hat in Time 12:09 Dishonored 2 12:18 Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time 12:25 Red Dead Redemption 2 12:33 Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii) 12:58 Fable 3 13:10 Resident Evil 2 Remake 13:24 ZombiU 13:53 DOOM (2016) 15:14 Final Fantasy XII

I was really impressed when I played Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire and as you flipped through different pages of the inventory (each with different types of items) you would see the backpack rustle and a different pocket would open up.

One of my favourite channels, keep it up!

For The Wind Waker HD, I always used the GamePad as a map, which is incredibly handy when sailing; I barely used the inventory screen, since the map's so helpful - now I don't need to constantly pull up a menu to check if I'm going in the right direction!

I do love your UX videos. One... Interesting... Early Inventory example is found in Treasure Island Dizzy. Where the three inventory is a queue, with the same button for picking up and putting down items (And empty spaces in the inventory are represented by 'empty' items, so if you want to put down the thing you just picked up you have to press the button thrice more, the first two times to cycle it to the top of the inventory and do nothing else.

100 paperclips are heavier than a kilogram of feathers.

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.

A very good and informative video. Menu design has never been my strong point.

What's the music that starts around 6:45?

I would love to have a limited size inventory system that would work like tetris: you made a perfect line? The items gone now.

I really cannot describe how great it is to just have a second screen for inventory. Windwaker HD made great use of it. It really makes the whole game experience a decent amount better.

The best tiny detail in breath of the wild was automatically opening your inventory to the last item you picked up or to the materials screen when by a cooking pot.

Hang on, I'm still trying to process that whole door ajar/ door a jar thing.

I like these videos man. As a game developer myself this is the most helpful channel in regards to teaching me stylized, tricky, and the fundamental principles of designing a game. This video itself helps me more than you may know.

The problem with quick wheels, though, is that if they’re dynamically split, then the “quick” part vanishes every time something new gets added, because suddenly you have to learn a different wheel layout. What was once a learned muscle movement to quickly grab your bow suddenly becomes a massive hinderance when the bow has moved position. (It’s very similar to the problem I have with touch screens, when things change right under your finger as you’re about to press down) Because of this, I’d argue against that particular implementation of the quick wheel thing.

Next time, highlight *all* the games you highlight in the video. This (UX?) change will reduce the amount of comments where someone asks for an interesting game's title significantly. You don't need to provide a link to their games; a simple title on the screen will help out. Unless, you *don't* want people to know which games you want your viewer to learn from...

Interesting video, there´s a lot to say about the subject. Usually more really bad examples are covered. Pokemon gen I is probably one of the biggest, infamous inventory misfires on multiple counts. At least a lot of kids like me had their first experience with a inventory, and had to quickly learn how to deal with it. Only 20 slots with a bigger(but also finite) inventory elsewhere, no seperate sorting except manually changing the order, and many slots are needed for key items, basic healing items, pokeballs in which you might want multiple types.. The TMs are badly labeled and clog up what limited space you have in no time, as do specialized in battle aiding items, and healing items for specific afflictions. And the billion PP pickups you might want some of around. It creates a lot of inventory pressure in a game that isn't really designed well to test it. Even if you know your way around the game you spend a lot of time fiddling around with your bag, such as dumping TMs, which kind of feels like a chore. Generation II's improvements into pockets already made for a dramatic improvements that eliminated some of the more blatant illogical pressure, but added more with berries, and tactical held items. The held item pressure build up again in gen III, until they finally just made your pack infinite from gen IV onwards(and split medicine off for good measure)

What's that catgirl mecha gun thing?

With Majora's Mask I feel like what you're kinda exaggerating the problem. you really only have between 3 and 5 masks that you're ever going to be switching between, the three transformation masks, and maybe Bunny Hood and Blast Mask. Every other mask is extremely situational. You're not going to, let's say, ever need to have the Romani's Mask on a c-button while in Ikana since it's only ever used to enter one building in Clock Town. Majora's Mask has about the same amount of commonly used items as OoT.

Dude, I am a graphic design student looking to work in the game industry once I graduate. You have no idea how helpful your videos are. I subscribed to your channel without hesitation. Thank you!

6:41 Frontier Village theme from Xenoblade Chronicles... I see that you are a man of culture.

Missed opportunity to talk about Skyward Sword's quick wheel. It was even quicker, more precise, and didn't need to pause the game for it to work.

I'd have to say one of my least favourite inventory and general ux has to be the dragon quest series. Each character has an individual inventory as well as a sack in later installments. Every action you can do has a separate command and once you do it the entire menu will close. So swapping items becomes a chore of repeatedly opening the menu, finding which character has the item, going to their individual inventory, selecting give item, choose the character you want to give the item to, which, hopefully they have enough space because otherwise you have to close the whole menu and give away one of their items first, then give the item to the character. Reopen the whole menu to repeat the process or equip the item you just gave the character then repeat the whole process for anything else you want to use or move around in your inventory. Not to mention actually seeing what items do is relegated to an identify spell that you have to cast on any item in your inventory which typically gives you vague unhelpful information anyway. It doesn't help that item names in general are fairly non-descriptive of their function and names change between different translations and localizations. The ux in those games really tends to make them a frustrating experience where it really shouldn't be. They're great games, but their inventory system(which as far as I know is still pretty much the same in the later games) really makes the games drag out at times far longer than they should. Even something simple like keeping the menu open between actions would go a long way towards making ux better.

"They fixed it in the remake though. " By doing what???

Secret of Mana's ring menu is one of my favorites.

10:14 Ratchet and Clank's quickselect? (quickwheel) 11:55 Metropolis bgm from Ratchet and Clank right before you mention quickwheels?

The time-slowing effect of DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal's weapon wheel is great for normal gameplay, but unfortunately introduced a lot of unintended side effects. For example, the BFG's energy tendrils will spend longer zapping enemies if you bring up the weapon wheel after firing. Slowing down time in DOOM Eternal also caused you to be able to do a super jump by pressing the jump key repeatedly. That effect was leveraged by speedrunners to be able to jump to the skybox of each level and just run to the exit, meaning that Doom Eternal speedruns are really boring to watch.

I remember that, in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, there was a button that could be pressed to swap between customizable sets of items and abilities. You can find a similar feature in Starbound, where the press of a hotkey allows you to swap between rows of hotkeyed item slots.

“...about how you can carry a hundred swords” Yeah, now you can only cary 80 swords

I really liked that in ratched and clack all 4 in one if you played with a friend and you opened your menu it didnt pause the game so you had to work together with your friend and pause at the same time to stop time

Aha! This helped validate some of my beliefs about UX and also taught me some new things to think about. Great stuff as always!

I love this video, such a unique topic and the editing and information is done so well. Subbed. Thanks for this

your re4 inventory management is so damn terrible ;-;

Its ya boi, *best thumbnails in the game,* back at it again

So it's not just me who has spend hours sorting items in RE4? A minimum of an hour, actually. I don't understand how I managed to finish that game to begin with.

All I know is that I loathe Skyward Sword's inventory system; compared to EVERY OTHER LEGEND OF ZELDA GAME, the geniuses decided to make the inventory have four slots at first, with a maximum of eight slots - and to transfer several things from the classic Gear screen into this cramped space, such as ammo upgrades, shields and two Heart Containers in medal form. When the inventory's already being used to carry other medals and bottles. This was incredibly stupid, as it forced the creation of a goddamn storage bin for 'excess' items (something that's never happened before in this series, and never should have happened) with one of the most detestable NPCs running it, and made ammo upgrades (quiver, bomb bag, seed satchel) completely pointless. Oh, and the two Heart Container medals should've been eight Pieces of Heart, or two more bosses, or something, not goddamn medals that go into this accursed inventory.

great video! there is an inventory that i always considered such good idea, i know the game itself was criticized a lot, but the inventory in Alone in the dark (2008) i just love it. To access the inventory, the game would turn into first person, then the character would open his jacket and there it was, you could use pockets and several others parts in the cloth to stock itens like a gun, munition, batteries for your flash light, healing stuff etc, so cool!

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).

"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.

10:10 - Regarding N64 Zelda being limited to three face button item slots: Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast solved a similar limitation by making the R-trigger act as a modifier to toggle between two layers of custom actions on the X, A and B face buttons. (In both "layers", Y was kept as the communication button - which, come to think of it, is a bit like how Ocarina of Time had C-Up as its button to communicate with Navi!)

Kingdom Hearts 2 still has probably one of the best "feeling" menus out of any game I've played. Its super fast and responsive.

That Jack and Casie game looks adorable and really interesting! Too bad it's uhh... never gonna finish. Looks like its kickstarter hasn't been updated since 2019, with the dev's last message saying they were taking a hiatus for mental health reasons. The chances of a kickstarter project getting back on track after such a long hiatus are historically almost zero. :( That sucks, since it's a neat idea with some great art and ideas.

On quick wheels, Prey 2 has a great quick spyral.

*Stopping time while in UI is the best option because it double as a pause button.*

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.

I’ve been looking for a good inventory ux video for a long time. Thanks for the great content!

Thumbs up for the Xenoblade music in the background! ^^

That final fantasy party.

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.

Me playing phantasy star online 1 on dreamcast: "what? the game didnt pause for menu?"

I have to disagree with the phrasing of "there's no right answer". It's more that there is always a right and wrong way to do it, but which answers are the right and wrong ones are different depending on the context of the game.

you didn't mentioned Heretic at all, seriously? You had quite a selection of items that you could collect and use whenever you need them, and you can activate them with just a couple of keys to select the item and use it and other games also used the same system, Hexen, it's sequel and Strife allowed you to see anything you had, rather than just the item you had selected and well, even Duke Nukem 3D had inventory items that worked in the same way

I didn’t like how switching weapons in BotW completely paused the game. I wish it just slowed it down instead

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.

I think the encumbrance system in TES is not necessarily there to make it feel realistic, but to have you strategically think about what items you carry. You're more limited so you have to make smart decisions about items, which adds another layer of depth. (Also great vids man)

He should’ve put Minecraft on the list

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.

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

Thank you for bringing Jack and Casie to my attention! c:

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

And Doom had the keycards which upon retrieval, are shown in the lower end of the screen too

Take the door ajar… actually the door is a jar… wait a minute.

So - should I use icons or text or both? List or Grid? Categories or everything on one screen? Controller Cursor or selecting UI Buttons? For an RPG the Circular Menu won't work, too many items. How about the button to open the menu? Prey had it on "Mouse Wheel down", most games have it on TAB or "i"-Key .. In the end this video left more questions open than it answered. Not a bad video in total but more details of what worked for which genre would be really helpful. I haven't seen a single good menu for any game that has more than 15 items. Edit: I guess most of the viewers are game-devs, so you could say something like "Icons are better, if you have to budget for it" plus the reason why they are better (if thats the case).

I bet you'd like to have more bombs. 🔥🧙‍♂️🔥 ⬛💎⬛ ◾-100◾

This is one of the better Design Doc videos. Love what you're doing with UX+gaming!

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

"Precision of the analog stick". I'm sorry, what?

hey! how about a video about the start of a game :D Like the instruction to a new game :D

Found this video on my feed. 16 minutes later, and I've subscribed. UX is very near & dear to me, and seeing UX analysis in games is mixing two of my passions. Looking forward to binging on your other videos!

Pokemon legends arceus has an awful item ux 🥶

Check out the Magicka controller controls for another way to fix the n64 controller problem. Each direction splits into 2 more allowing for a sort of hybrid between the hotkey and the quick-select wheel

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.

you are just talking about UX in digital interfaces, UX is involved in all parts of design where an user interacts with a product. UX is not just catered to mechanics of digital interaction. Its there in all aspects, including marketing even monetization and Brand is now part of UX on how an user perceives a product and derives the experience from it and then decided a purchase or not.

I think, notably, Final Fantasy XIV and Fallout 4 did a great job at dealing with inventories and hotbars. Fallout 4 allows you to peek and loot lootboxes without opening them, even though you still can if you want, and the hot bar is diamond shape and the item you use depends on the amount of D-pad clicks you did, which basically solved the issue some people might face (at least me) with diagonal D-pad clicks or rotation wheels, with the only down side being that you can't instantly use an item (though you can always just pause the game). (Secondary screen? Won't add a lot besides map viewing actually, but it's not like Fallout 4's map is that useful anyway.) FFXIV used RB (or R1) to switch between one of the 8 available hotbars, with each using LT and RT (L2 and R2) and all the face buttons and D-pads to provide 16 slots. It's really good for MMOs that needs tons of hotbar spaces just to fit all the skills needed, though requiring more additional buttons (in this case, the possibility to use FPS style layout is eliminated) to activate, and the learning curve is of course steeper.

Hah, Morrowind. I know where you got that hat!

You're really gonna try to sneak that Ratchet and Clank background track by me huh?

MK8's gamepad wasn't wasted! You could honk your horn, see the placing and items of other racers, use it as a second screen, see a map of the track, or change your controls!

Now I'm wondering how translators could even begin to deal with things like that "door ajar" bit

Imagine Minesweeper in the RE4 toolbox...

The Dead Space series will forever have my favorite UI/inventory display. Looks clean, fits perfectly into the game's lore, and doesn't break immersion or even actually pause the game.

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

Yess, I always loved the inventory of RE4. After I played it I started looking for games with that same inventory system haha

Anyone else see the RE4 parts of the video and just start yelling "COMBINE YOUR FUCKING HERBS"

Bad UX is one of the reasons why I strongly disliked the Switch remake of Link's Awakening. I never played the original but I heard it was worse there because the sword and shield needed to be constantly swapped out with other items because of a lack of buttons. In the switch remake they improved this but forgot about the feather item that lets you jump. WHY WAS JUMPING NOT ASSIGNED TO A BUTTON IN LA HD? THERE WERE SPARE BUTTONS ON THE CONTROLLER THAT WERENT BEING USED FOR ANYTHING, AND JUMPING IS REQUIRED IN MOST IF NOT ALL AREAS I have a plethora of other issues with that game like how it's literally the price of BOTW when it doesn't deserve to be, but my experience would have improved if jumping had its own button assigned. I would've still disliked it, but I wouldn't have hated it like I do now

Inventories are also another way to measure how much care was given to a PC port. Usually a PC game doesn't need the big, few per screen items that console games usually have to make it easier to read on TVs.

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

Joey, Jojo, Jr., and Shab? Those are the worst party names I've ever heard.

Everyone talks about how they fixed the iron boots for the OoT remake. No one talks about how they really fixed that in Windwaker.

Item encumbrance absolutely does not feel realistic. On top of the problems you mentioned, it isn't realistic to me that you could carry 50 giant fuck-off swords and twelve full armor sets in your (nonexistent) backpack just because "Oh, your character is a big boy, he can carry that weight." Like, I don't care about weight, where is he stowing away that dragon skull the size of his torso? That's why the Resi 4 inventory is the most realistic inventory in gaming, as well as one of the best. If you can't make your inventory realistic, and it doesn't really matter to begin with, don't even bother me with stupid stuff like weight limits. ("But you can't just carry EVERYTHING from a programming standpoint!" Yeah, ok. Just change item weight to item size and it's at least a bit more believable.)

Does anyone know the name of the fourth game shown at the start of the video? This one? 0:27 Just need to know for uh... research purposes, yes. ^^;

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.

Minecraft has the most famous UX.

But if it is a separate menu I hate it. Far cry 2 and Metro Exodus have menus that don't stop the game flow (map is not a separate screen but u hold it in your hands and move around)

Mentions Skyrim but not SkyUI.

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

How to screw a goodgaame with bad UX. somebody calls MOTHER series? really, i just fuck of earthbound and mother 3 right on the end of the game´cause i save some itens that i need ´cause i was left of space

Part of me is annoyed when footage of Splatoon's menus. Most of them are good, but by the time your wardrobe begins bursting, it becomes almost impossible to find the outfit you want to switch to, unless you have a physical dlc amibo quickswap set up, and even then, you have to break from your lobby to use it. As one who likes the feeling of progression from constantly trying to unlock ability slots, i can never find the pieces i want in a timely manner, at least not enough to expect to make it back into the same lobby. Sort by abilities likely wouldnt work with the amount of abilities, but at least it provides a learning curve that can eventually be mastered to find what you want quickly. At bare minimum, there should have at least been a sort option for myster slots...

First, sorry if I misspell, english is not my first language I was thinking about an encumbrance system with different characters having a different capacity. I wanted to encourage the use of a varied party (teams of 3) and having varing, unchangable stats to each unique character could tell something about that character while encouraging using different characters instead of a universal meatgrinder

"No game is centered around how its inventory works" Mate have you SEEN Escape from Tarkov? Its basically Dayz Tetris edition

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...