Good read (via Mercury Reader, anyway) -- the concepts apply beyond games, to UI design in general.
Building games that can be understood at a glance
31–40 of 64 posts
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#32Earlier 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…
No, this has nothing to do with simplifying games. Complex games can be intuitive and build up complexity as the player learns. Take something like Civilisation. You don't need hours of tutorial to play the game. As the game progresses, it becomes more and more complex, but you start with 2 units, no enemies and no technology. After you build a city, technology is introduced. As you start exploring, enemies are intro…
cf Paradox's Crusader Kings etc., where you can start off with a tiny county with an army your larger neighbour can effortlessly stackwipe to avoid the issues of managing subordinates if you want, but if you don't read the manual to find out what all the options mean, you'll struggle to get beyond the tutorial never mind understand why people find it addictive (or buy any DLC...)
And weirdly the mystery UX forcing you to pore through the manual and how to guides might actually be a good thing since even if you start out big enough to conquer and learn how to raise an army you're going to find it very frustrating when you lose it all and more happy because you didn't research the implications of gavelkind inheritance
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#33I'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…
This is such a great game! It actually became my go to and helped me break an addiction with League of Legends.
Do you mind letting us know how much you were able to sell the game for?
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#34Eh, 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…
TBH, there are a couple of things I think StS could improve regarding its GUI.
Moving the energy stat next to the End Turn button would probably make it harder to forget to spend it - you'd think only youtubers do that because they're distracted by commentating (looking at you, NL), but it happens to all of us.
I've also found it weird that the draw deck is on the left but the hand adds new cards from the right, so the card draw animation has cards flying in from the left to the right and then moving back left again.
(I don't participate in the StS reddit but I'm sure these things have been brought up there.)
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#35Alternative title: Building single screen casual games.
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…
what's easy? what's simple?
getting over it is extremely minimalistic, immediately accessible and exceedingly difficult
stellaris has a lot of layers, with the ux segmenting the game minigames for the user, but the core game loop is quite straightforward and the complexity mostly cosmetic.
triple town has both a simple interface and simple game rules, but complexity grows exponentially with the combination level, 2048 is more of the same.
there's no direct relation between interface complexity and game complexity; there's no even direct relation between rules complexity and game complexity.
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#36with gems around like mini metro, strategery and mushroom 11 the choice of using this game seems like advertisement. the moment you need bars text and info panel you can't really claim a game is understatable 'at glance'. heck even the article say the game has three interpretative layers!
compare and contrast: getting over it, freeways, tsuro.
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#37I 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, o…
Do you have such a screenshot? I've played it a bunch and it never got unclear but maybe I just got used to what all the doodads mean. For what it's worth, I don't think the 'three reads' thing is particularly informative or useful way to highlight what that make the ItB design good.
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#38Eh, 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…
The health is always in the top bar, and additionally beneath the character on battle screens, where the player figure is visible, matching the enemies health display.
Having the own health only in the top bar on battle screens seems wrong: the enemies have it fully displayed, and in battle health development is obviously especially important to see, so the bar-representation makes sense.
Removing it from the top bar just on battle screens doesn't seem to make that much sense either (do you pop it back in when a full-screen menu appears during battle, which covers the player character? redesign those screens to be more cluttered, just so the bar on the character is visible?)
One can argue about the importance of the status icons. For some of them I'd prefer it if they (or rather, their effects) were more noticeable, others are not that important most of the time. On the other hand, them being were they are the important facts are displayed fairly compact and leaving lots of room for the really nice graphics - I'd disagree that the overall screen is cluttered.
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this has nothing to do with simplifying games. Complex games can be intuitive and build up complexity as the player learns. Take something like Civilisation. You don't need hours of tutorial to play the game. As the game progresses, it becomes more and more complex, but you start with 2 units, no enemies and no technology. After you build a city, technology is introduced. As you start exploring, enemies are intro…
cf Paradox's Crusader Kings etc., where you can start off with a tiny county with an army your larger neighbour can effortlessly stackwipe to avoid the issues of managing subordinates if you want, but if you don't read the manual to find out what all the options mean, you'll struggle to get beyond the tutorial never mind understand why people find it addictive (or buy any DLC...) And weirdly the mystery UX forcing yo…
The second paragraph here seems like it can be summarized as, "reading about things the game doesn't tell you about is good because you'll learn about other things that the game doesn't tell you about."
What if the UI was good enough that it exposed some of those gavelkind inheritance implications?
Re: Building games that can be understood at a glance
#40As 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…
This isn't about game design (rules, mechanics, balance, etc.), it's about design of GUIs for games.