#game interface design

[stardustlazy]

My friend’s not a fan of my UI mockup. What do you guys think—does it look decent at least?

[scipunk]

Avalon (2001)

[kawaoneechan]

A'ight. This is what the inventory screen looks like in Animal Crossing New Horizons, right?

And this is what the few UI elements Project Special K has so far look like.

Which is not too different from the mockup I'd made May last year when this got started if I say so myself.

Just a little brighter, a little blue-er, and maybe a little too close to the top edge. All things that two config files can change.

So I was thinking earlier, would a similar style work for the inventory?

I kinda freehanded the scale and amount of things (and I just bothered to count and it turns out I got the amount just right what the fuck) and the bells counter is missing but yeah, instead of a bubble it'd be a screen-spanning rectangular panel. With the // edges on the other elements so far it'd have to be like that or the entire grid is slanted to match. Alternatively, the sides of the panel could be straight vertical but fade out.

[prokopetz]

Finally throwing together a proper character sheet for Space Gerbils. The generic pawprint watermark will be replaced with something appropriately space-agey once I get around to commissioning a logo. I've tried to keep the write-in spots nice and broad for the benefit of those playing with pen and paper because I cannot write small to save my life and under-height form fields are therefore my mortal enemy.

[theslimeologist]

Copy? I think you mean share.

[moonsinkfoxgirl]

my beloved old nuclear powerplant girl also got a redesign to go with me finally learning the scripting:

should the coolant in her backup tanks ever go below 250 (10%), she now deactivates the reactors, and flushes the thorium right back out into the input container; plus of course an on/off button, and some status information^^

[fayewoodss]

I completed the trio, might post all three together

[bmpmp3]

give him to me NOW!!!!!!!!!!! or i'll settle for a release date pwetty pwease

[vlada-artblog]

I've made hundreds of icons for Nightingale, here is a glimpse at some of them! The metal bases for ingots was hand painted, the ores are a mixture of painting, 3D models, and photobash. I referenced Soulslike icon conventions heavily, especially Elden Ring. The alchemical symbol alphabet was developed to help with accessibility (differentiate all the ingots accounting for colour blindness).

[destined-productions]

Excited to share a glow-up for Mighty Marbles! 🎉 Check out the old vs. new level transitions—what a difference! Now every level even has its own name. 🚀 Which style do you prefer?

I love making this game with passion and I am so excited to share it with the world, but somehow I need to let the world know. Unfortunately the way steam works is the more wishlists the more visibility, so if you are interested it is super appreciated :)

Wishlist on steam or visit the website to find out more mightymarbles.com

[litapeanut]

The musical combat quests in Alan Wake, Control and Alan Wake 2 seamlessly blend musical expression with conventional gameplay mechanism to create an unconventional gaming experience, proving video game medium is legitimate art.

*These game caps don't do the games justice, playing them does. Because unlike other art forms which only allow you to passively consume, video games are interactive.

[askagamedev]

My friend is making an arcade racer and I've been playtesting his builds for him. He didn't go into it thinking it'd be easy but there's a ton of things he didn't at all realize would be a headache going into it. Obviously all games are hard to make but some are more apparent about their daunting nature. Which genres are deceptively difficult even if reasonably possible by a small indie team? What surprised you when you hit the big leagues?

Whenever I do solo dev work, the feature that always takes the longest and tends to require the most work to get something playable by actual players is the UI. Building out the gameplay features is always a lot of fun, but you can only go so far by fiddling with variables and restarting. There's always a significant amount of UI groundwork that needs to be done in order to make a game playable at all, just because of how much information needs to be conveyed to the player.

Whenever I build support into a game for different characters, cars, tracks, loadouts, etc. then each of those options needs its own way to choose that option from a list of available choices. That display must show a lot of information to the player so she can make an informed decision (e.g. this car has fast acceleration, that one has high top speed, this other one corners well, etc.), which all requires an intuitive screen layout, information presented, and so on and so forth.

Small-team dev also tends to build more system-driven games because it's more dev-time-efficient than creating single-use narrative-driven content. The tradeoff is that system-driven content also requires significantly more UI to convey all of that information to the player. This means games with a lot of options for players to choose tend to require a lot of UI work, which is something many hobbyists don't think about when starting.

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[scipunk]

Avalon (2001)

[rie-kay]

[gamedev:part 4]

This week I added a few new things: First was the implementation of FMOD—which is always a struggle, because the plugin is very specific in its needs, but a bit opaque on what those are. The second was loclization support. Menu and dialog can now run in German as well as English.

I also wrote some music. What is audible in the snippet is only part of the song. There is also a funky D’n’B intro, and I want to extend the song to work as one piece with several distinct parts that change during various moments in the game. I had the idea to add a low pass filter when entering the pause menu. Switching it on and off worked after a while, but I wasn’t able to add a transition (haha) for that effect. @harsh-noise-scalies came in clutch again and helped me write a very clean tween method. Now there is this phaser-like effect, when entering the menu—which I think is pretty sweet.

Another new addition is this dithering shader. It just got uploaded about a week ago and is everything you could wish for with a dithering shader. The colors get defined through a LUT. At first I tried out a few from the recommended website, and later made my own color scheme. For me dithering is the digital equivalent to riso printing. This shader is soooo cool. You can find it here:

[godotenginemastery]

Advanced User Interfaces

One of the most powerful features of the Godot Engine is its UI system. Without a doubt, it is one of the best such systems in any game engine available. The power its UI system gives the user is unmatched by even Unity or Unreal Engine, in both breadth and depth. This is one of the reasons the Godot Engine is a viable solution for creating not only video games, but software applications too.

Perhaps the best example of this is the wide array of user-created plugins and extensions that the community has created for the engine. Many of which make extensive use of the engine's UI functionality to create sophisticated programs that run within the editor, alongside it, to great effect.

Many engines, especially open-source ones, tend to neglect the 2D aspects of game creation and focus heavily on 3D. Many of these engines put even less focus on the user-interface creation tools. The Godot Engine is the one exception to this, however. Which makes it unique among all game engines.

[fruitiermetrostation]

Would the UI design for the original Just Dance count as frutiger metro?

Yep!