Exilian

Preferred/interesting concepts for inventories - what's your favourite, what do you take into account when designing them?

Obviously some games have more sense for needing different features like bulk/space limits/weight limits, and the UI needs to differ to account for some of that. For my own game I want a fairly light RPG sort of feel but I'm wondering if the classic grid panel look is the right way to go or if I'd be better with e.g. a Skyrim style sidebar... or if there are other more interesting options I've missed entirely. Thoughts welcome!

My main thoughts, in no particular order, based almost entirely on playing games rather than designing them:

I absolutely despite NWN1-style inventory where you have to organise items based on their shape/how many slots they occupy (with eg a sword occupying 1x3 squares of the available space, but a potion bottle only occupying 1x1). It's not a super common inventory type that I've seen and I suspect it's very out of date as an option, but that was the first thing that leapt into my head. If I want to fit weird shapes into inconveniently shaped holes, I'll play Tetris.

I generally prefer the grid-based system to Skyrim's sidebar. This might just be a skill issue, but I felt like I spent a lot of time scrolling in Skyrim for the thing I wanted. I might just carry too much stuff...

On which note, I'm not hugely keen on encumbrance-type systems as a rule. I enjoy looting places and carrying interesting things I find and in a game like Skyrim, I enjoy having a couple of options for armour/weapons for different situations. With encumbrance systems, I therefore often spend far too much time slowly inching my way to a merchant, which is a drudge, or feeling like I can't carry what I want, which is frustrating. It doesn't really feel like it adds to the player's enjoyment, so much as it's just there to add 'realism', which seems a little ridiculous when one can cram 15 wheels of cheese in one's mouth in the middle of a fight.

I quite like the inventory system used in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom. You have a number of tabs for different types of item you might pick up (weapons, shields, materials and so on), and several of the tabs have a limit on how many things you can hold in it (eg you start the game with 5 slots for weapons, 5 for shields and 4 for bows; you are not limited in the number of materials or armor types you can carry, which I prefer). You can also expand the number of slots you have by spending a particular currency. This means you aren't carrying *too* ludicrous an amount of gear and there is still a challenge around good inventory management, and occasionally some hard decisions about what to drop so that I can pick up something better/more interesting, but I don't feel like I spend an excessive amount of time on it.

I also think it is generally useful to have some way of 'quick swapping' between things, such as a quickbar that allows you to assign a couple of potions and some gear (a la Neverwinter Nights and similar) or a quickslot for potions/spells you might need to access quickly in the heat of battle.

Final thoughts: in terms of equipping gear, my favourite system is that found in the Witcher 3, where you assign gear to particular slots (eg you have one for your head, torso, legs and feet, a couple for rings, one for a necklace or similar, one melee weapon, one ranged and so on). It makes it easier to create interesting characters/adapt to situations with particular enemies, at least in my opinion.

In my opinion, most RPGs don't benefit from limited inventory space.  I think this is probably a holdover from ancient RPGs where memory was at a premium, so inventory was sharply limited just because the game could only keep track of so much.  If I want to haul all of the loot out of the dungeon, then I will find a way to do it. Limiting my bag space just means that I have to make multiple trips, and that doesn't accomplish anything except wasting my time.

Fully agree with Spritelady about the Tetris grid.  It reminds me of one of the worst inventory management games I have played in recent memory, Grim Dawn, which used this type of system.  What made it so much worse than most is:

• Equipment tends to have very steep stat requirements, so there was a lot of stuff that I held onto just because I couldn't use it yet.
• Pursuant to that, there was also a lot of stuff that I wasn't actively using, but still held onto because it had significant stat bonuses that could help me equip other items.
• Items take up anywhere from 1 to like 8-10 grid squares, and your inventory has multiple pages. Try finding the 1x1 amulet you're looking for in that mess.
• Resistances are pretty important, and there are A LOT of resistances.  Like eight different types, I think, so I'm stockpiling aether resistance gear and bleeding resistance gear and so on.
• You have a "stash" like in Diablo 2, including a shared stash, but a new character cannot access it until they complete the first quest chain, which takes, I dunno, an hour or two?  I know that they did this on purpose just to hinder people creating bank characters.  Why are they so petty about this?
• As is generally the fashion in Diablo 2 clones (but which was actually not the case in Diablo 1), there is an absolute ton of loot, which means there is a lot to go through to see if any of it's worth using (usually not), multiplied by the fact that there are so many resistances to keep track of and so much banked gear and no free space for anything new, which in turn means A LOT OF TIME spent messing with your inventory and teleporting to town and back to figure it all out.

This is a huge hassle.  I literally quit playing that game because of inventory.  I think the last straw was when I completed a mini dungeon that had like eight treasure chests at the end, which took me forever to sort through, only to end up with nothing but vendor trash (and items don't even sell for very much).

Speaking of Diablo and inventory, people forget that Diablo 1 had effectively unlimited storage in single-player.  Anything that you dropped on the ground would stay there forever.  But since Diablo 2 redesigned the engine around multiplayer and non-persistence, it introduced the stash as a poor workaround, and now that is a standard "feature" in that subgenre of games.

Limited inventory can potentially work in certain design circumstances, like if you want to limit how many healing potions a player can bring into combat, or if you have a run-based game and have to decide what supplies to bring with you, what loot to keep, and what to leave behind.  Darkest Dungeon did this for example, but even there, it was extremely irritating in practice (why does one little gemstone take up as much space as camping equipment for four people?).

Atelier is a better example of inventory limits, I think, although how they implement inventory and item use varies a lot between games.  Most of them are based around crafting and time management, so you have to weigh how many bombs and potions and such you want to bring with you vs. how many gathered materials you want to haul out vs. how much time it will take you to travel there and back.  When fighting the optional superbosses, you need every single inventory slot for consumables, and you need to figure out the right balance of which ones you need, so that you can kill the boss before you run out of supplies.  On the other hand, in most of the games, you have nearly unlimited storage space in town to store all of your many many MANY crafting materials, and when you craft an item, it filters the required components so that you only have to look through what is actually needed.

Thanks both, these were really helpful to read!

I think there's maybe a few features to consider:

• How much can you store, and can you store it on the fly? So essentially pickup hindrance.
• How accessible is that stuff in battle? How fast do you need to access it?
• How sortable is it?
• How much do you get to pick up in total?

I'm currently thinking that some answers to those questions will be:

• I definitely want some kind of tabbed storage.
• I kind of like the idea that the storage might have some different types of slot, so maybe e.g. you can carry a certain number of large items and a certain number of small items, but these aren't interchangeable (which has some logic: if you choose not to bring your sword, it's a bit impractical to just assume you're then going to fill the scabbard with mushrooms you picked up).
• Definitely planning to assign gear to slots.
• I'm planning for you to not need too much stuff in general: this isn't a game where I want it to focus on things like combat builds, and I think the ally NPCs might have static loadouts rather than you being able to re-equip them.I also don't really want to go down the route of having a hundred different magic swords: I'm more interested in trying to make a world that thinks about why and when you should carry certain items than tries to power-scale items all the time (one mechanic I'm thinking about for example is that if you want to do violence in an urban area, you might be better carrying a working tool which the guards won't bat an eyelid at than hauling around a great big glaive).
• Further to not having too much stuff, in my plans there'll be far fewer enemies dying and being looted than in a more normal RPG, so that big "loot drops" cycle won't be there.
• I think a "central storage" separately to the player's inventory might make sense for limiting e.g. potion carrying, and also to stop loot-happy players just getting totally lost in their own loot list.

One thing on Antiquity's annoyance list that I think might be necessary for me is only unlocking the stash after the relevant quest is completed: I don't see how it would logically make sense for the PC to be able to send things to base before they have a base. But also, that is in my mental schema one of the first block of quests to unlock after the intro, so I can probably just restrict how much you get to pick up early on and maybe give players a dialogue nudge that if they want storage, they should prioritise getting the base? Or maybe it means I need to railroad getting the base first but I'd rather leave it more open.

Regarding grids versus lists: I do see how lists take more scrolling. I don't hugely want to make a static grid that ends up with lots of gaps in it: is an auto-sorted grid view something people would have any problems with?

Quote from: Jubal on September 08, 2025, 09:28:38 PMI kind of like the idea that the storage might have some different types of slot, so maybe e.g. you can carry a certain number of large items and a certain number of small items, but these aren't interchangeable (which has some logic: if you choose not to bring your sword, it's a bit impractical to just assume you're then going to fill the scabbard with mushrooms you picked up).

OK, but if a sword counts as a large item, does that mean that I could put a spare suit of armor in the scabbard instead?  This sounds complicated.

Quote(one mechanic I'm thinking about for example is that if you want to do violence in an urban area, you might be better carrying a working tool which the guards won't bat an eyelid at than hauling around a great big glaive).

What would you do with the glaive when you walk into town?

QuoteOne thing on Antiquity's annoyance list that I think might be necessary for me is only unlocking the stash after the relevant quest is completed: I don't see how it would logically make sense for the PC to be able to send things to base before they have a base. But also, that is in my mental schema one of the first block of quests to unlock after the intro, so I can probably just restrict how much you get to pick up early on and maybe give players a dialogue nudge that if they want storage, they should prioritise getting the base? Or maybe it means I need to railroad getting the base first but I'd rather leave it more open.

There's nothing inherently wrong with doing that, a lot of RPGs have done something similar (the car in Fallout 2 or the castle in Might and Magic VII, for example).  The problem with Grim Dawn is that it is the exact type of game that shouldn't do that: an overcomplicated loot-clicker with a heavy focus on playing multiple characters and class builds.

QuoteRegarding grids versus lists: I do see how lists take more scrolling. I don't hugely want to make a static grid that ends up with lots of gaps in it: is an auto-sorted grid view something people would have any problems with?

The benefit of a grid of icons is that you can quickly identify things visually, but the downside is that you can't quickly identify them by name.  Even auto-sorted, this is probably only a net plus if the inventory is relatively small.  When I used to play Everquest 2, finding anything in my inventory of several hundred slots was a nightmare.

Quote from: Antiquity on September 08, 2025, 10:50:53 PMOK, but if a sword counts as a large item, does that mean that I could put a spare suit of armor in the scabbard instead?  This sounds complicated.

A good point - still mulling over that. I guess my feeling about the utility is that broadly it separates bulky from non-bulky stuff and avoids that oddity where e.g. a shiny rock takes up the same space as a bedroll. My logic then was that it therefore forces some thought to go into what to wear and what equipment/big tools to carry (because that's more or less all in the bulky category, and is mostly something I do want the player to consider) while not applying that consideration pressure to the small bottles, parchments, small finds, etc (which could get an absolute chore for the player). But it might not work as an idea.

Quote from: Antiquity on September 08, 2025, 10:50:53 PMWhat would you do with the glaive when you walk into town?

Leave it at base: the player's base location is something I want to be a fairly core game element, and I'm thinking that once you unlock the stash I might let players magic-pockets things to the stash location quite easily, so you should need to go to base to kit yourself out but you're never hampered in gathering/looting in that you can then just send a bunch of stuff to stash and keep on with the current activity.

Quote from: Jubal on September 08, 2025, 11:01:54 PMLeave it at base: the player's base location is something I want to be a fairly core game element, and I'm thinking that once you unlock the stash I might let players magic-pockets things to the stash location quite easily, so you should need to go to base to kit yourself out but you're never hampered in gathering/looting in that you can then just send a bunch of stuff to stash and keep on with the current activity.

So, would that mean that when you enter a town, you have to stash all of your weapons, but when you leave, you can't take them back out?

Quote from: Antiquity on September 09, 2025, 01:24:28 PMSo, would that mean that when you enter a town, you have to stash all of your weapons, but when you leave, you can't take them back out?

When you leave town you'd almost certainly be going back to base anyway or at least very easily could do, is my current thinking. This isn't going to be a game with a huge open world and lots of towns: there's going to be one main settlement that the story is set in/around, so I wouldn't leave players without pretty easy access to their stuff.

And there should be ways around the problem: certain sorts of people can carry weapons or blag their way into being able to do so, or you might take a build that doesn't need them, or you might just fight brawling with a masonry hammer which is a normal enough trade tool to carry.

I actually quite like the tetris-style inventory system in some games, though it is heavily dependent on the type of game and how much stuff there is to actually fit in there. Subnautica uses differently sized rectangles in a grid for items of different sizes for example, and it works pretty nicely along with the oxygen mechanic which means you need to take regular trips back to some place with larger storage anyway.

I also recently enjoyed the way Vintage Story handles unlocking extra inventory space; by default you start with just a 10-slot hotbar and no proper inventory space, but you also have 4 slots for baskets or backpacks which can be crafted. Different tiers of backpack/basket provide different numbers of inventory slots, and also double as limited portable chests by allowing you to put the backpack and the things in its inventory slots on the floor.

When it comes to things like equipping weapons and armour, I'm partial to a grid-based system with armour and weapon slots over a Skyrim-style long list of items.

Something that I feel like could be interesting (though maybe too clunky in practice) is having something like some slots to attach things which may allow carrying specific things, a slot on a belt to attach a scabbard which provides a sword equipment slot for example, or a slot on your back which takes a backpack which provides a whole bunch of slots for potions and scrolls and such, or alternatively takes some kind of holster for a weapon.