Guild of Darksteel is a cinematic platformer/adventure game set in an dark fantasy world. Like most adventure games, it is story-driven, but instead of going through one main story line, the player is invited to take part in many smaller stories on the theme of death. Each character you meet has his own story and his own problems. How you decide to help is entirely up to you, but their story will evolve in consequence.
Here is the inventory system for Guild of Darksteel.
The way I approached it was rather simple.
I have a List of strings with the name of each item the player has.
Then a list of possible sprites for each item available in the game.
To display them I created 25 empty image elements placed properly on the inventory frame and I made a function that swaps the empties with sprites corresponding to the strings in the inventory List.
I don't really know if there is a common best practice way of doing these kinds of things cause I'm a noob, but it's working great for me!