Talking about UI: Inventory

Thinking about UX

Nowadays everybody seems to talk about user interfaces in adventure games. Well, maybe not everybody, but I recently watched a video by Point&Click Devlog in which Adam talked about playing a point&click adventure called "Voodoo Detective", which got him thinking about the UI in his own game "The Biggleboss Incident", because it was very well done in that game. That's funny because I just finished a game called "Encodya" which did a pretty bad job with it's UI and which got ME thinking about the UI in my game and UI's in general.

Inventory from hell

A thing that absolutely drove me nuts in Encodya was the inventory. Not only was it in the way and hiding for example hotspots of scene exits that were at the bottom of the screen, but it had some additional points of shame, too:

1. Everytime you use an item on an object, that has no iteraction for it, it got deselected and the item was put back into the inventory. That means that you have to pick up that item again from the inventory to use it on another object.
2. The first point is bad enough, but what made it even worth was the fact, that you can't just pick an item and it's active. No, you have to click it and select "use" from the appearing interaction menu. Way too many clicks to perform a simple task.

It's not amusing at all to pick up the first item by clicking it and choosing the "use" interaction, than scrolling through the inventory item-by-item by clicking on the "right arrow" to get to the end of the list and then using it with the last item to get a "That doesn't work" and the item is no longer selected. To test this item again with another one you have of course scroll to the start of the inventory item-by-item by clicking on the "left arrow". And because of many red herings in your inventory you may click very often to get around. Can't imagine a way of getting it worse than that.

Use single interaction?

Another bad design decision is, that even with scene objects that only have one interaction available, you have to click to open the interaction menu and then select the only available option. The game was created using Unity and Adventure Creator, like my game is, too, and there is an option called "Use single interaction?" which suppresses the interaction menu and directly shows the only possible interaction, when hovering over a hotspot. Why wasn't this feature used? It's just checking a checkbox. I don't know.

Conclusion

There's only left to say that an UI should support the player to find a solution to a problem and not be the problem itself. The UI has to be the players weapon against the enemies (puzzles) that the villain (adventure game designer) throw at them. Encodya did a pretty bad job at this.