Game UI By Example: A Crash Course in the Good and the Bad. How easy is it for your player to put their intention into action, or to understand what's going on in your game? In this tutorial, you'll learn how to build a better game UI by examining both good and bad examples from existing games, and end up with a checklist of questions to guide you through designing them. As gamers and game developers we know that immersion is everything. When you're immersed you lose track of time and become involved in what the game is presenting. A major factor in what makes or breaks immersion is how easy it is for your player to convert an idea into an in-game action -- that is, how fluid your game's User Experience (UX) is and how well-designed its User Interface (UI) is.
A composited screenshot from Honey Bee Match 3. In this article I won't be teaching you how to put a UI together. The terms UI and UX are sometimes (incorrectly) used interchangeably, but they have specific meanings. A good UI tells you what you need to know, and then gets out of the way. Portfolio | Fantasy Game GUI. Game Interface Archive. 5 Simple Ways To Improve Game Menus. This small article is mainly targeted at hobby game developer. I think that the title menu of your game should receive proper attention, since it is the first screen of your game the user will ever see. And we don’t want our user to start with a strange feeling, don’t we?
In this article I will show you 5 really simple ways to improve your title menu without any design skill at all. Assumptions Let us assume that our title menu should feature the following 4 functionalities: Let the user start a game – now that’s obvious. Let the user resume an already started game Let the user view and change some options. Let the user quit the game That are not much possibilities to choose from.
For demonstration purpose I chose a really minimalistic one. Many Kudos to Shangyne at deviantart, who made the background image (actually it’s a wallpaper). There is nothing really about this kind of menu. 5 Simple Tips 1. Contrast is important for readability. Not a pleasure to read, isn’t it? 2. 3. Maybe you do. 4. User interface design in video games, diegetic interfaces | the wanderlust.net. U ser interface design in games differs from other UI design because it involves an additional element — fiction. The fiction involves an avatar of the actual user, or player. The player becomes an invisible, but key element to the story, much like a narrator in a novel or film.
This fiction can be directly linked to the UI , partly linked, or not at all. Historically games didn’t have any real link to the game’s narrative, most likely because early games rarely had strong story elements. Erik Fagerholt and Magnus Lorentzon explored theories of game UI design in their thesis for Chalmers University of Technology titled: . Diegetic Diegetic user interface elements exist within the game world (fiction and geometry) so the player and avatar can interact with them through visual, audible or haptic means. Uses a complete Diegetic UI with no HUD elements to help to support the game’s narrative.
Assassin's Creed uses it's eagle vision to highlight enemies and their patrol track. Meta Spatial. Opinion: Some Hows And Whys Of Usability Testing. [In this reprinted #altdevblogaday-opinion piece, freelance game designer Emmeline Dobson explains why developers need to do usability testing, and offers advice on questioning participants and listening to their feedback.] Usability testing is on the increase, led by companies like PlayableGames and Vertical Slice in the UK, and Microsoft Games Studios having offered its gameplay lab services to its exclusive developers for Xbox from before 20031. Yet it can be regarded as expensive, troublesome to organise, and just a distraction from making features for a game product. It doesn't have to be. Why do usability testing? Steve Krug's book Don't Make Me Think!
This model for design could be adopted more in game dev and allows usability problems to be identified much earlier in the process of development2. Adapted from Hussein's Developing eLearning Materials Skinny usability testing A usability testing lab looks something like this: Based on the labs at PlayableGames Conclusion References.