Subnautica: Below Zero
A survival action-adventure game set in an open-world environment.
Subnautica: Below Zero is an open-world underwater survival game developed and published by Unknown Worlds Entertainment. The player travels to Planet 4546B to explore unique biomes and survive its dangers. They survive by collecting resources, constructing tools, bases, and vehicles, and interacting with the planet’s wildlife.
In this project, I fix a very frequent UX issue I encountered in my playthrough and added new UI components.
Intro: Inventory UI
At the heart of any survival game is your inventory. The player relies on it to eat, collect minerals, create bases, and survive.
While viewing an inventory item or blueprint in your PDA, a window is overlayed on the screen giving information on the item or directions on how to create a blueprint.
Problem
When the selected item or blueprint overlay appears on the screen it covers up the users’ other inventory items, making it hard to scan your inventory and annoying to easily view your blueprints. The player can use the R stick to quickly scroll through their inventory, but when doing so they cannot view any information, item details, or blueprint details.
Inventory items.
Information on Rotten Creepvine Sample covers other inventory items.
Blueprints.
Information on how to create an Advanced Wiring Kit is blocking other available blueprints.
Solution
My solution is to create a concept where the user can quickly scroll through their inventory and blueprints while viewing all information associated with an item, equipment, or blueprint in an unintrusive and user-friendly way.
Solution: Inventory
To resolve the issue of inventory information being overlayed on top of other items in your inventory, I created a separate panel above the inventory items that shows the same detailed information about what you have selected. It shows the player all of the necessary information associated with that item in a way that lets the player also easily view the other items in their inventory.
Inventory fix
Creepvine information is clearly displayed above the players’ inventory.
Solution: Blueprints
To resolve the issue of blueprint instructions being overlayed on top of other blueprints in your inventory, I created a separate panel to the right of the inventory blueprints that show the item that is selected and how to create it. It highlights the blueprint without covering other blueprints and still allows the user to easily scan and view all blueprints available. This solution also provides enough room for 4 construction materials, which is the maximum amount that any blueprint requires in the game.
Although the user is able to see fewer blueprints at once, this is ultimately a better user experience because the information is presented more clearly and less intrusively.
Blueprint Fix
Advanced Wiring Kit blueprint instructions are clearly presented to the right of blueprint inventory.
Conclusion
I wanted to create this project because I experienced this issue in Subnautica, and was curious to see if anything would change with the release of Subnautica: Below Zero. Because there wasn’t a change in the PDA UX, and since the PDA is such an integral part of playing Subnautia, I wanted to see if there was a way to make the experience more streamlined.
If given more resources, I would love to user test this scenario to see if it is indeed an issue among other players and validate my designs as well to see if it’s an optimal solution over the current design.