User Interface is an important part of game design that is often overlooked as a place for innovation. It’s very easy to just follow the usual conventions – points go on the top, currently equipped weapon and life stats go in the corners, and so on. The result feels outdated and clunky, sometimes filling up the screen and making the player feel like they’re using a word processor instead of entering a virtual world.
But UI deserves to be an area of games that receives great effort from designers. It is the way that the player interacts with and understands the game. Imagine a well-designed car that had a poor steering wheel or a well-written book that had an illegible font. While these may not be as exciting as the car’s horsepower or the book’s character development, they still can greatly enhance or detract from the user’s finaly experience.
Thus, great care needs to be given to UI, and it should be held up to the same scrutiny as other designs in the game. Does each part of this UI support the core experience that the game is trying to convey? If not, why is it here? How can it be made better?
Game Design: In-Environment UI
Applicable Platforms: Action Titles
Applicable Experiences: Games seeking strong player immersion
Dead Space is a franchise that shines as a great example of strong UI design. In both Dead Space and the recent Dead Space 2, the team at Visceral made exquisite work of a feature that is normally thrown by the wayside, and made it integral to the experience.
No Hiding Behind a Menu
Dead Space’s core experience is for the player to constantly feel threatened, to never feel safe, and always be on edge and in danger. Thus, a strong sense of immersion was needed so that the player forgot that they were in a game and instead felt like they were on a derelict spaceship. A clunky UI or “Click here!” would threaten to ruin the environment that the rest of the development team had sunk months into.Thus, Dead Space’s UI strives to feel like part of the environment in a few different ways.
Tutorial Instructions. In the beginning of Dead Space 2, the first piece of helpful UI that the player sees is in the midst of mass hysteria. A comrade was just killed at close range, and more monsters and enemies are appearing all over.
It would have been tempting for the designers to ruin this scene by sticking a sloppy pop up in front of the screen, overlaid on top of the action. But Dead Space’s main UI format prefers to immerse itself better than that. The UI pops up as a hologram attached to main character Isaac Clarke’s suit, flickering just as all the other lights in the room do. And the UI isn’t disembodied from the action, it moves along with Isaac, never leaving the world of the game.
Health and Ammo. Another great example of good UI placement throughout the Dead Space series is the now-famous back UI, where Isaac’s health, ammo, and other common UI items are found not on some corner of the screen, but on his back.
By lighting up parts of his suit, shifting from cool blue to danger red, Isaac’s back gives the player all the information they need while still keeping them sucked into the game’s dark and deadly world.
The result is a great piece of UI that both tells the player what they need to do without being so overt that it reminds them they’re just playing a game. By staying quiet, getting the message across, and blending in with the action, the UI doesn’t so much as provide a spare breath to the player as the experience a heart-pumping opening sequence.
Doors and Interactables. Other forms of UI appear all over the environments in Dead Space, providing clues as to what they player needs to go in order to interact. However, the UI again follows the same design guidelines that the team set for themselves: be part of the environment, don’t be intrusive, but get the point across.
When Isaac walks up to different doors, weapons, or items, then the UI appears as a hologram, clearly telling the player what needs to be done. When nearing a door, a blue image appears on top of the door, asking the player if they would like to open it. The sci-fi environment makes it easy to believe that this is exactly what Isaac is seeing, again keeping the player inside the scary reality of Dead Space.
Engagement and Understanding
Strong UI design is hard to come by. While it isn’t often the most exciting part of a game to experiment with new designs, doing so can pay big dividends for keeping players engaged, helping them understand your game, the two keys to a great user interface.
Readers, feel free to comment below: are there any other recent titles you’ve noticed that have done great work with innovative UI designs?
I thought Flower did a great job at handling the UI problem. It hardly tells you anything, but you get lots of feedback through experimenting and interacting with the gameworld itself. You don’t need meters or score or text because you can visually see your own development and the sound design and environment effects help reinforce your overall progress towards the goal (which the game never tells you about, but you end up discovering as you move along. Quite an impressive feat).
-Kaz
That’s a great reference — thatgamecompany has always done well with minimalist UI.
I think Mirror’s Edge does a wonderful job with UI as well. There is virtually nothing on the screen except the dot that tells you which direction you’re facing and whether or not you can use slow-motion.
Other than that, important objects turn red when you approach them, explained by being able to have a different sight than other people – and even that is disabled in the hard difficulty.
That, and you get to see the legs/hands of the character as well as having the camera realistically restricted greatly helps with the immersion.
Now this is quite interesting. I actually just finished playing Dead Space 2 for the first time a moment ago and I must say that the UI of the game is absolutelly horrible. However I can still agree that the design of the UI is indeed great and innovative. Bit contradictory? Not at all, because UI design does not equal usability.
Yes the UI is pretty, flashy, immersive, however it is all that at cost of usability, which makes it more difficult and unpleasant to use. To me it seems that in this case developers have seen immersion much more important than actual functionality of the UI, which has led to sub-standard UI in terms of usability.
I don’t know about you, but for me clearly visible “outdated and clunky” UI elements, as described in the beginning of this article, have never bothered me or turned me away from a game. However a sub-standard UI is something that sticks out immediately and causes frustration. If I was a game reviewer I’d knock 15 points right off from a 100 point review without hesitation just because of the UI, maybe even up to 20 depending on how it plays out further through the game.
And in case you’re wondering, I played it on PC.