As a counter point here, there are an immense number of articles on "good" game design. But the problem is that you'll have a million exceptions in games that do phenomenally well breaking all these notions, and a million games that flop abiding all of them. Really I think the point is that games are more of an art than a science. The regular inability of companies to replicate their own past successes should itself be more than sufficient evidence of this.
Building games that can be understood at a glance
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#22Alternative title: Building single screen casual games.
Neither Into The Breach nor Hearthstone are 'casual games'. Getting them to be work almost entirely on a single screen is a UI design achievement.
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#23Eh, I just don't agree with this at all, and also find the presentation awful which is an irony. If you're going to give an example of slay the spire doing something wrong, show an alternative. The slay the spire shot has 13 artifacts active, and 5 status effects, and the criticism is that twitch stream viewers don't know what they do? That makes no sense. A) Twitch stream viewers wouldn't know what anything does fro…
I don't think the point is that Slay the Spire is doing something wrong, the point is that Slay the Spire is designed as a PC game so it doesn't have the subway read-abillity imperative that mobile games have. Most people find out about Slay the Spire through Twitch, but that is not how most mobile games are discovered.
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. The continuous push to make everything easy (as in gameplay and also learning) is annoying. Not all games have to be simple. I believe games have huge potential for teaching problem solving and systematic thinking, but by dumbing them down were partially eliminating this. The ultimate example are mobile games. They optimized for profit by dumbing them down and adding addictive, simple gameplay loops. They also…
I for one welcome games that don't require me to sacrifice hours and hours to be enjoyed. I have job and familly and while I like games, they have only limited time and effort box available. Any more then that and they get deleted, as a strategy. You don't have to like them. Not every customer wants to dedicate whole life to games. I am thankful to mobile games creators that they did not rejected my demographics and…
Thank you. There are tons of complex games out there. I really like them in principle. I may even play them for a while if the learning curve is reasonable. But the days I’ll put hours into games are pretty much past and were mostly never there in the first place.
Truth be told I’m the same way with a lot of complex TV shoes. I do watch some like GoT but I’m pretty selective about it.
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#25Alternative title: Building single screen casual games.
Neither Into The Breach nor Hearthstone are 'casual games'. Getting them to be work almost entirely on a single screen is a UI design achievement.
I don't know about heartstone. But for itb, there's not a lot of information to show at the same time and few system that interact with each other. I think the game design was constrained by the goal of having the simplest possible UI. So, even if ITB is not a 'casual game', it's not very complex and each game is short.
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither Into The Breach nor Hearthstone are 'casual games'. Getting them to be work almost entirely on a single screen is a UI design achievement.
I don't know about heartstone. But for itb, there's not a lot of information to show at the same time and few system that interact with each other. I think the game design was constrained by the goal of having the simplest possible UI. So, even if ITB is not a 'casual game', it's not very complex and each game is short.
In its core mechanics, it's not that much simpler than, say, a recent Fire Emblem. You can google your way to interviews with the authors where they talk about the amount of time and fiddling it took them to get the UI to where it is. The design evolution of FTL's UI over the years is another good case study. This doesn't just happen by making the game 'simple'.
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#27I've designed and built a quite popular game called ∞ Loop ( http://loopgame.co ). One of the goals was to have no text in the game at all, and try to design it so that the "right thing to do" would be the first thing you'd try to do, to make it truly intuitive. We've sold the game and now it includes a tutorial with written explanations of what to do. In my view, the tutorial is unnecessary, because it's far nicer t…
Oh shit, I absolutely love Infinity Loop! I played it a bunch and got a ton of mileage out of it. It hits what in my experience is a very difficult to achieve balance of relaxing and engaging, and even though it's simple it never really feels repetative (meditative, maybe?).
I played the pre-tutorial version and I found it highly intuitive and easy to get in to, I think you really nailed that aspect. Thanks for the great game!
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#28Eh, I just don't agree with this at all, and also find the presentation awful which is an irony. If you're going to give an example of slay the spire doing something wrong, show an alternative. The slay the spire shot has 13 artifacts active, and 5 status effects, and the criticism is that twitch stream viewers don't know what they do? That makes no sense. A) Twitch stream viewers wouldn't know what anything does fro…
I don't think the point is that Slay the Spire is doing something wrong, the point is that Slay the Spire is designed as a PC game so it doesn't have the subway read-abillity imperative that mobile games have. Most people find out about Slay the Spire through Twitch, but that is not how most mobile games are discovered.
Well if all he's saying is that Slay the Spire would be difficult to understand on mobile, well then I agree. However that didn't sound like what he was saying.
He describes it as "criticism," but doesn't convince me there's a way to make the interface better. In fact, I'd go the opposite direction and suggest that hearthstone is too simple a game in the name of simplicity.
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#29Eh, I just don't agree with this at all, and also find the presentation awful which is an irony. If you're going to give an example of slay the spire doing something wrong, show an alternative. The slay the spire shot has 13 artifacts active, and 5 status effects, and the criticism is that twitch stream viewers don't know what they do? That makes no sense. A) Twitch stream viewers wouldn't know what anything does fro…
He kind of indirectly did with Hearthstone. Things that are important are brought forward and highlighted, or animated, then fade back to the second or third "row" of importance.
I didn't read the whole article, save searching for "slay the spire" and reading the accompanying sections, but I agree with his criticism of it, assuming those little status icons below the characters really are as important as he says.
And why is your health in two locations and two colors? Maybe there's a good reason, but if I take the author's word for it, it is redundant and raises more questions than answers at first glance. I'm primarily a developer, so I've only dabbled in formal UX study, but it does seem like the game is just giving up easy design wins. Design is subjective, but I suspect many UX folks would agree with him.
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#30I basically spent this entire weekend playing "Into the Breach" so I feel qualified to comment on that game being identified as "visually well-designed".
Here's one great thing about ItB that was not discussed in the article (probably for brevity!). When you're deciding what moves to take, the game will show you the effect of the move you're about to do. This is really handy because often your moves have knockback, or splash, etc so it's challenging to figure out on your own what exactly your move is going to do.
The not so great thing about ItB, visually, is that after a certain point in the game the grid just becomes too cluttered. This is because every enemy in the lategame has effects, splash, special moves, etc. It becomes difficult to parse visually. If the article had dissected a screenshot from the late game, they probably would not have come to the same conclusions as they did.