The trouble with UI

So far in all my games, UI has taken the backseat. And by backseat, I mean I stuff it in the boot at the last minute.

I just started listening to a podcast by Butterscotch Shenaningans and they spent 55 minutes talking about tooltips in their new game. Which goes to show how much developers think about the design even with a limited team of 3 people. And one of the things that I took from this conversation was how much little things matter in a good game. Putting a lot of time into these things is unrewarding as people will not notice that the text is spaced correctly and consistently or that the health bar is a certain style. The idea behind a good a game is not only novel things but also the absence of problems. People would not notice if a store is categorized proplerly but will definitely noticed if the goods are placed all over the store.

The trouble here is that this problem is fairly common and often complicated. Butterscotch Shenanigans spoke about text formatting for 40 minutes, and this whole time they were just listing out the problems. Which goes to show just how much thought you have to put into these matters for people not notice them. Unfortunately, most game engines do not have great in built functionality for UI. As a result many developers end up making their own in house packages or buying from the asset store. However every problem has multiple solutions, so once you start with a solution you better stick to it.

One of the most robust systems from UI is fortunately pretty easy to break into. It is HTML, you can easily define structures, the way they are nested and can apply pretty much any visual effect you can dream of. It already has functionality for state changes like hovers and clicks, and also resizes the component to the canvas pretty consistently. Together with Javascript we can also make it very dynamic which empowers us to move components around in an interesting way.

So this month I will look into Web Development more seriously, trying to make simple websites with fun aesthetics. And wouldn't you know it there is a web specific game jam this month with a very juicy prize pool. Gamedev.js

Podcast by Butterscotch Shenaningans

~sailboat642