You might not be an information nerd like me, who wrote an entire Master's thesis arguing that Half-Life 2 is basically a library catalogue, but you probably appreciate a good video game interface. The newly-revamped Game UI Database is geared toward developers, but there's ton of great stuff in it for anyone who's ever paused to admire (or hate on) a game menu.
The Database is the work of Edd Coates, and contains over 55,000 screenshots and videos of various video game menus, inventories, game over screens, health bars, maps, objective markers, and more. It's been around for a few years, but its 2.0 version released this week, after what Coates said was "nearly 3 years of work" that added, among other things, the ability to filter by "screen types, controls, textures, patterns, HUD elements, colour and more!"
As a survival game fan, I've really enjoyed the Database's collection of crafting menus, which shows just how varied--and challenging to create--these kinds of interfaces are. And, as a stealth game fan, I had fun poking through the selection of hacking and lockpicking screens, reminiscent of the playable lockpicking museum from a few years back.
It's cool to see how different games handle these elements and convey information to the player, and the Database's search tools let you really drill down into finding what you're looking for. Users can submit their own examples for Coates to add.
Coates wrote in the changelog for the 2.0 update,
I can’t believe it’s finally here!! What began as a promised anniversary update in 2021 quickly feature-crept its way into what would become the biggest project of my life... What you’re seeing here is three years of hard work, rebuilding everything from scratch in an attempt to create the dream website that I’ve had in my head for well over a decade.
2.0 is only the beginning (but please don’t ever let me do a 3.0).
