One of my favorite design choices in Lethal recently is the truck and it's manual. You order the truck and everyone's first instinct is to hop in the driver seat and start it, neglecting the manual that sits in the back warning you about driving while in park and 95% of the time people's first experience is exploding the stupid thing
In Ballatro, there are several random elements of the UI that you can click and drag. This serves no purpose other than to be satisfying and make the UI feel alive. When im thinking or mad I grab the Blind Chip and move it around
I think the dev stated he made the blinds chip thingies movable so that if you’re mad at one (like the plant vs your eternal pareidolia) you can take your anger out by throwing it around
As someone who's never played it, Trackmania got me with bad design in a way that wasn't even mentioned. At one point text popped up saying "WELCOME TO STLJNT" and it took me fully a minute to realize it said "STUNT"
Right, why the hell is that U stylized? The only thing that saves it is the tiny color bands at the top... but otherwise, it reads like some special promo club, like you entered the Le Mans competition section of Trackmania
It should be noted that because the Lethal Company footage shown is modded, it actually provides better UX elements than what the base game offers. You mentioned being able to use cameras to see what your buddies are doing inside, but that’s exclusive to mods, not vanilla. Same with the loot value indicator at the bottom right. What’s curious about Lethal Company is that the game does have *all* of the basic information in it, in terms of tutorials and what you need to learn. But all of it is hidden in throwable manuals, a barely audible speaker, and a computer with hidden inputs you can’t expect to know off the bat. This allowed the game to be built around the community of players and how they share their experience online, and it’s better off for that.
while a lot of the footage is modded, i think the main points still stand. and i feel like the camera one is semantics. in vanilla it's a radar map with more limited info (and extra info too) but its not that different from a camera (and the ship has 2 cameras on it that look outside)
the only difference with the map/camera thing is that the names are on the dots instead of being in the top corner, it makes no noticeable difference the loot value thing is also just a streamlining thing
Is it better for that? Because I've rarely, if ever, seen people have fun unless it's offing themselves with the zombie mask on day 2. No one reads that basic info because they're too busy TRYING to die so they can stop playing.
@@deadersurvival4716 i dont know what you’ve watched but i think its safe to say a majority of people dont kill themselves so they can stop playing, its a game your free to exit from at any time so i’d bet most on purpose death is for the funny also if people didnt want to play it then why did the game do so well, also just to counter the “popular cause youtubers” arguement: among us hasnt been popular for like 2 years but its still got an active player base
@@Grand_Kaiserin_Elysium Aside from the plethora of examples I have of people who I played with, are you going to seriously, with a straight face, try to claim that most people didn't mimic Markiplier and his group doing THAT EXACT THING within only a few sessions? And to be honest, I don't think that counters the "popular youtuber" argument? You realize that videos on the internet are nearly permanent, right? That UA-cam can, and will, offer you old videos if you've shown literally any interest in the subject matter or the creator themselves. Sure, the playerbase will get lower once they move on, but that doesn't change that they fundamentally change how we play video games, even for people who AREN'T in their fanbase. Just because a game has survived without those content creators doesn't mean that those content creators didn't leave an impact. As for amogus specifically, that one is still at least somewhat common for top echelon Twitch streamers to this day. Try again.
10:55 “… the new unlocks’ exclamation [mark] icon is moving; not constantly, not dramatically, just a small punctuation”. This pun hit me WAY too hard.
The series is back!!! One thing I've always wanted to hear about is Enemy Sound Design. Having good design of it can let players instantly identify enemies without the need for visual contact, and that's amazing. Salmon Run's Boss Salmonids all have extremely distinct sounds to them that makes it easy to tell when one of them is nesrby without ever having to see them. The sloshing of Steelheads, the clanking of Steel Eel jerrycans, the echoing pop Drizzler torpedoes make. It only ever takes me seconds to recognize when a Boss Salmonid spawns and what it is before I even get a visual on it. Talk about it!
I concur! When I think about Sound Design, I think about Overwatch and how it uses sounds to indicate a lot of things that players might not consciously think about, but still value keeping track of. Your guns will usually emit some sort of sound that’s unique to each weapon to indicate when they’re about to run out of ammo. Your ultimate ability makes a tiny charging-up sound when it’s fully charged. Enemy abilities and positions can often be tracked by split-second sound cues that experienced players will learn to pick up on (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve immediately ducked for cover after hearing the click of a Widowmaker’s heels on the ground OR the tink of her grappling hook latching onto a surface nearby). It’s all very neat stuff. I hope someone makes a video on it some day.
The same thing could be said about Lethal Company's sound design too. Each creature has a distinct sound it plays, except for the Bracken which is meant to sneak behind you. The Nutcracker will make mechanical footsteps and play Army music when provoked. The Barber, which was just added in the latest version, is completely invisible unless you're within 7 meters of it, but you know it's there because it plays a loud snare and horn note whenever it moves. Plus, the game takes advantage of using proximity chat, like having echoes when you're indoors, having a muffled voice when the snare flea (the game's version of a facehugger) attacks you. Even the ambient music that plays outside adds to the game's atmosphere, especially in single player.
You described lethal company perfectly, it’s like the dev would do whatever would cause a funny scenario. Everything that makes the game so all over the place was done for the pure sake of chaos and I love it.
It's becoming increasingly and inescapably obvious to more and more people that Lethal Company is not a horror game; it's a comedy game, with horror elements that provoke adrenaline responses to heighten emotions-just so the comedy is better punctuated. Slapstick, as it turns out, is very much something that can be engineered and provoked by an outside hand, and by putting players in a situation where the tools they have are pitifully inadequate for the task ahead of them (short of expert nutjobs who have figured out how to send Morse in wiggles to the terminal operator), those players will latch on to the zany humor elements present and elaborate on them. Moreover, a joke at a funeral that makes everyone laugh, even reluctantly, may not be all that good of a joke, but for those people who feel like they shouldn't be laughing to begin with, that joke feels like the most profoundly comedic wit simply because what else would make them laugh at a time like that? LC embodies that in its contrast, and is all the better for it.
@@depressedtoaster887 Zeekers definitely got a bit of outside help even if in just small contributions from the community, plus the community-centrism of the game makes mods very common, as long as they improve the experience whilst keeping the horror-comedy spirit of the game
editing feedback: could you put the name of the games that are shown in b-roll in future videos? or all games shown in general? some of these games look nice to check out and there's usually no way to tell what they are without looking at the comments section
I second this, I feel like every video that covers multiple games should do this whenever possible. It just makes it so much easier to look up anything that seems interesting. Edit: Ok, I just saw that he did include the games listed in the description at least. Though I would still say showing it on screen is probably better because so many people don’t even look at the description on videos unless they’re explicitly looking for something lol
@@ninja_tony And the games listed only are the ones talked about. If you see a one or two second clip of a game that piques your curiosity, good luck finding what it is. You will have to ask people to tell you what the name of the game is. I've always thought it's a terrible design to not mention the games' names somewhere on screen, especially when the game capture doesn't even occupy the whole screen.
I'm sorry but I find it ironic that a series about presentation of information doesn't display the names of the games being shown on screen. It'd be kind of funny if the show itself was an example on Good design, Bad design. In any case, good episode!
Sure, the featured games are said and labeled but there are many others shown that aren't. Including: the Lego game, the bubble game, Minishoot Adventures, Pokemon Violet/Scarlet, Animal Crossing New Horizon, Paper Mario TTYD, Neon White, Zelda Breath of the Wild, Smash Bros 4 Wii U, Monkey Ball Banana Rumble, and -that last one with the blue character- Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip. Even though I recognize most of them, it's good to label them for anyone that's interested in the footage but doesn't know the name of the game.
Low Skill Disease sounds like an actual disease from a litrpg light novel. Like if a character doesn't increase their level often enough, their health becomes poor.
@@AnotherDuckI mean, I'm slowly working on an isekai that'll probably never see the light of day which pretty much just sets up a basic set of weaknesses that aren't ever really going to stop being weaknesses, just grow less extreme (mc is a pseudo self-insert who really loved science, but could never quite make it into uni, ending up in a dead end factory job and learning for fun in his free time, before eventually working too much overtime, and making a lethal mistake [remember to check the papermill is actually, properly off before trying to fix any internal errors], and getting reincarnated with just his eclectic knowledge of science, politics, etc. and his average intelligence. He struggles with magic, social interactions, and applying his knowledge, and will only really become average at best in those areas [no super powerful magic, will still laugh when he's supposed to be serious and has no reason to laugh, will still make non-optimal decisions because he didn't figure out the optimal one till afterwards, and will still struggle to meet his own deadlines without assistance]), because while they're rare, those are the kind of isekai I enjoy, where the supporting cast is needed not simply to worship the mc, but to fill in the gaps left by those flaws and produce a well rounded cast. Of course, the mc will still have to grow, but that growth will primarily be finding ways to work around his flaws, not escape them or make them into a hack (he already has a hack in the scientific method, a modern understand of chemistry, and a world full of magic where a deeper understanding of the new laws of physics can bridge the gaps in his knowledge from a lack of formal education [and the world not always working identically, like black powder not working properly while flash paper does {charcoal is more endothermic and can't reach the requisite temperature}])
Feels like the Trackmania menus just have no hierarchy. Everything is on the same "level" and actively fighting against everything else for your attention. You don't know where to look, because everything looks the same. And to make matters worse, the other menus are scrolled with LB/RB, which only works if the menus themselves work. It's just a mess! Also I don't think that not being able to see the timers is nitpicky - it's the one thing the game is about. It should do that well.
And iirc, TMNF was way more consistent (bearing that I've played maybe 5 hours in the past decade) and readable. So it's not like they CAN'T do better (a sentiment that holds true for a lot of Ubisoft teams).
oh my god i skimmed through the video to see what was where and i saw lethal company on a bad design slot, was like, "really? what, is it 'good' bad design? " I WASNT BEING SERIOUS
My pet peeves when it comes to UI navigation are 1. Mandatory text scrolling with no option to make it instant. 2. Camera changes happening in between dialogue rather than during it. 3. Fade-ins and fadeouts that can't be skipped. All these can make even simple tasks more tedious, especially if such tasks happen many, many times. I'm looking at you, No Man's sky!
Cruelty Squad would be fun for a video, it's so completely jank, but the jank not only fits the game really well, but feels so satisfying to play with.
one thing i wanna add about the speed in balatro is that as the game scores your hand, it gradually speeds up usually it is only just noticeable, but when doing some insane hands, it can get *really* fast. and in a way, i feel like it adds a sense of power to those hands. you've made a hand so powerful that the score counting becomes nearly incomprehensible. besides that, a nice touch in balatro that i really like is that whenever something happens, the game makes it really obvious. everything is (usually) accompanied by some audio and visual effect, as well as text.
Yeah, UI is about showing the right amount of information for the type of game in question, it's not a one size fits all. An example of that I remember is Onirism not having a timer for a self-destructing zone sequence in order to increase tension
One of my favourite small details is when neon white lands on the ground the his face in the bottom left moves to sell that you landed which can be important for speedrunning to give an obvious indication that you landed on the ground because you have not wanted to.
oh yeah Neon White's UI is insanely good at portraying what little info they'd need to portray. It's still crazy to me just how intuitive the card system is at portraying what you have & how much is left
@@Triforce_of_Doom especially since, as a speed running game, you don’t have time to dwell on the info. You have to be able to get all the info you need at the quickest of glances.
I do want to point something out about Balatro, all that movement makes a lot of people motionsick, myself included. For me, I just needed the backgrounds to stop swirling, but for some people, the movement of the cards makes them sick. The game was recently updated to allow a toggle for the backgrounds, but there still isn't one for the animations. Just some food for thought. The game's fantastic otherwise, but sometimes, a charming esthetic for some is a serious problem for others.
yeah, honestly, i think this video convinced me i don't want to play balatro until there's a setting or a mod to tone that down! the wobbly cards especially, and some of the informational boxes bobbing up and down while you're trying to read.... blegh .......
Came here to say that. Gives the same energy as actual video poker & digital slot machines, where everything is constantly moving & plinking. In a casino context, it's designed to keep you "engaged" and unable to focus/think about odds, or how much time is passing (or how much money you're losing). Have heard the Balatro dev came from the other "gaming", and did this for a change. But that design style acts like a filter for users who are more susceptible to addictive behaviors & crave constant stimulation 😢
This UI is so busy it reminds me of the past trend of squiggly cartoons, Dr Katz for exemple. I just couldn't watch them, and seeing Balatro here, it's a pass for me.
@@zephiiyros There's mods for it! And they're really easy to install too. I originally had a static baclgrounds mod installed before the offical option was out.
thats very interesting, i get really easily motion sick but its only for first-person games. turning off the moving backgrounds did wonders for me, but i'm glad theres mods for turning off other stuff! love balatro so much and id be pissed if i kept getting motion sick because of the design lol
i love this video, you explain things perfectly, you know the beauty of crudeness. and the NEED for small details, the small details are what build games. they really REALLY ARE what step up the asethetic!
I'm actually playing FFXIV while I listen to this, and when it opens with the Solution 9 music, I had to pause for a moment because I was in Limsa at the time.
i've been idling in solution nine for so long in between queues that the first few seconds i had to pause for a long long moment to process and realize i am not in fact in solution nine or even logged in
For future bad design: the UI of Zenless Zone Zero really surprised me with how cumbersome it is. Despite not all that much info being needed, a lot of it is tucked away behind submenus that are accessed by an ever-changing array of button functions. Its probably okay on mobile, but on console it is a nightmare. A good example of looking polished but actually jank.
@@stevethepocket Surpringly, no. They make getting to the cash shop very obvious, and even if you get very lost in the menus, there's still not really a way to spend money as those options always lead back to the cash shop. It's just inconsistencies that add up to a cluttered interface.
@@stevethepocket You say that but somehow the Hoyoverse games have 1 or 2 sections that are made for spending money, and those are always the button for the Games Gatcha currency and the games Shop. Both are easily accessed and not hidden behind some sceme. But i gotta say ZZZ is very pretty but that menu is more confusing somehow than any other Hoyoverse game
Great video as always! Ideas: - Good Design: Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime - It has one of the smoothest experiences I've had in a game. The menus are simple and clear, and it's the only Switch games that lets you seamlessly connect any kind of controller or pair of joycons without freezing the game to pop open a separate UI menu like even most of Nintendo's games do. It's also just full of intuitive mechanics and simple visuals that keep everything clear and streamlined. - Bad Design: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe - Specifically, the kart selection screen, and especially when it comes to accessibility options like Auto Accelerate and Smart Steering. I frequently play with people who don't play many video games, yet these features meant to help them are completely hidden in a near-secret menu with specific button toggles and unlabeled symbols. It also takes a frankly ridiculous number of inputs to find and select the kart pieces you want. Unlike Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, connecting and changing controller setups always feels like a pain and that menu can be easy to accidentally open. - Good Design: Unrailed! - The menus are partially a tutorial, letting you walk around to select menu items, getting you familiar with the controls. They also require you to work cooperatively, which is the name of the game, because everyone has to stay on the menu item to select it and you can dash into other players to bump them around. Some might consider it bad design, but when the menus can be as fun as the game itself, it seems like a win in my book. - Bad Design: Starlink: Battle for Atlas - It may be a great explorative ship-combat space romp with excellent gameplay UI, but it has some of the clunkiest menus I've ever seen with button prompts scattered around with little proximity to the elements they actually interact with and seemingly little consistency from one menu to another. Even after dozens of hours, I still fumble with figuring out how to mod my ship then select a new weapon and mod that. Additionally, the planetary maps are bafflingly bad. Planets have no north; as you rotate around the planet, the orientation changes, so if you go to find a landmark, then go back to find your ship, the planet's rotation has changed. This makes it almost impossible to develop any kind of mental familiarity with each planet's geography.
When making animations for a game, it's important to not just view the animation in a vacuum and instead take them in based on the context of the game as a whole - how often will a player see an animation? If they're going to see it multiple times over the course of a regular play session, optimizing it for being fast is good, and if you want to make more polished animations they should be for highlight moments. This is something that the RPG genre has tackled pretty extensively, with games of the 90s and 2000s often being subject of jokes because they can have full attack animations that are over a minute and you're expected to use every turn because they're the best moves in the game. Yu-Gi-Oh is a game known for, some say notorious for, massive volatile combos. In the actual game you're given a five-minute timer in your turn and it's very common that a player will use up most of that time even on the first turn. But the thing is that the game also has animations for every action, and the animations do not impact the timer. What this results in is the "fifteen minute turn" statement. Is it true that players get fifteen minute turns, in a game with only five minutes on the clock? Actually, yes. You can easily pop up clips from some of their goofy events like "you only have 30 seconds on the clock" and see turns that are easily over a minute, simply because the animations take so long. Some of the long animations are obvious, like excavation from the deck or the ridiculous chain link animation but even regular actions are not properly optimized for a smooth gameplay experience. And the issue is, since it's a game that is built specifically around multiplayer, you can't go into options and fix this. The long turns are one of the biggest pain points of Yu-Gi-Oh as a card game and so it's a mistake to do anything that significantly adds to the turn length, even if it's on the surface making a game more polished. Everyone who has picked up Master Duel has probably at least one moment where they open a game with no turn 0 interaction and just stand up from the computer and do something else while the opponent combos, so making the presentation as smooth and non-obstructive to gameplay as possible is what is fit to purpose for that game. Compare the speed of, for instance, a YGOPro replay with the speed of a Master Duel Replay - the only operant difference is EDOPro has LESS polish but the replays are way easier to watch because the animations are smoother and faster. Chrono Ark is also a card game, a party-based deckbuilder roguelike, developed by a small team so it doesn't have many animations on character cards, but it has a few. Animations come in a few flavors, there's regular attack animations that play out in real time while you play cards and don't restrict any player action, there's some animations that play when certain conditions are triggered like buffs or combo attacks that do restrict your move for a second but are just as fast as the basic animations, and then there's the couple seconds-long cutin animations reserved for the character's most significant and powerful cards to punctuate when you're doing something really impactful, for instance the tank character designed around building a lot of barriers has a cutin for his Shield Bash skill that converts barrier to damage or a support character with a very powerful but situational once-per-battle skill has a cutin that activates when it's used.
Please don't spoil a game that's not officially been out yet! I've been desperately avoiding spoilers form early access but people keep commenting them in places I can't control lol...
@@ThePaulineu oh, sorry, I swear I forgot about how it's been "out" for ages now and that the info was everywhere. Game itself is technically out on steam (Early Access but damn it's already pretty much a full game)
@@ravenstales6457 Yeah that's why it's complicated, I've tried blocking out all the hashtags and everything but youtube won't let me block words... It's less your fault and more UA-cam's fault for not giving us that option! But yeah it's good to keep in mind that many people don't play games in early access and want to avoid spoilers!
9:30 PLEASE change, Nadeo. Keep in mind that mods don't work on console, and it's VERY annoying that things like an action key indicator need a mod. (Not that the game makes any effort at all to explain what Action Keys even are...)
As much as I enjoy the game, Bear and Breakfast's menus drives me crazy at times. It feels like it would work pretty well on PC, where you can click and drag items and scroll through menus, but I play it on the Switch, where the navigation is much less intuitive. The "layers" of the menus are really confusing. I hate having to press a separate button to navigate to a section directly above where I'm currently at instead of simply pressing "up". I'm pretty sure the Switch version is missing an update for sorting crafting recipes too, which makes the process of scrolling through the entire list just to get to the one item, all the way down on the bottom that you wanted to make, a real hassle. The game is great, but the Switch version of menu navigation could do with an overhaul.
I dont think you actually know what vanilla lethal company is like because it doesn't have cameras, and the plethora of messy cosmetics and emote mods heavily decreases the value of the game's visual design. This makes the actual game pretty poorly represented in your footage.
He doesn’t once mention the mods though, and I think lethals modding community is prevalent enough that people who have never played the game knows that the cosmetics are obviously mods.
Splatoon 3 has mostly fantastic UI. But one bit of inconsistency has always bugged me. Normally during a match, when ingo appears in big bold letters to mention things happening in the game, the colour of the font matches the team that benefitted from what just happened. If you your teammate got a checkpoint the notice will be in your colour. If an enemy scored on your basket, it will be in their colour. Any time the leading team changes its alerted. With how fast paced S3 is, this is really nice because even if u don't have time to read, u can see the colour, and gleam the rest from context. EXCEPT FOR WIPEOUTS. A Wipeout is when all the players on 1 team are dead (what league of legends calls an Ace). This text js rhe only one that breaks that rule. It will ALWAYS be your colour, but with either black or white highlights. I can never remember which one is which, and I've had many times where I trade kills and see the thing pop up, and idk which team just went down. Sure there are other indicators, but the inconsistently of that one notification has always annoyed .e.
After a couple weeks, I finished watching all the videos on your channel. It was pretty entertaining! Learned some interesting things as well. The videos feel very professional but at times pretty casual, which results in a nice experience! Also, I was never bothered by the sponsored bits. Usually the introduction to them is done pretty well and sometimes I was even glad the videos got sponsored. I hope more people find your channel. You don't need to be interested in making games in order to have a great time learning facts about the design behind them and some cool tricks about game design.
Zelda Breath of the Wild, Wii U edition, when you play on a smaller CRT TV screen, the smaller text is not upsized to make up for the smaller blurrier screen, so you can't read anything. Taking into account different available resolutions is also part of good graphics design, I think
despite the fact it is supposed to be 4:3 in my setting option, which worked perfectly for all other games except this one, where they seemed to have assumed everyone plays in 16:9
Small text is the bane of my existence, and it’s 2-fold. PC game devs use tiny fonts because they assume people will play with their fces a foot from a large monitor, but I’m usually playing on my steam deck. Also, ever since HD became the norm, fonts have gotten smaller. It’s annoying.
when i think of bad design, I think of Wurthering Waves MENU SYSTEM. What a terrible UI. The washed out colours and similar symbols are confusing, and indistinguishable. The marks that tell you to do something never go away and are odd colours. There are too many nested menus with jargon; With not enough contrast to tell what you've selected. the controller wheel holds to much information. There is too much information, and it's poorly organized. It's a disaster.
Some games that could go here would be the games by Project Moon. They are often interesting experiments with some stellar writing but often suffer in their UI design. Limbus Company is especially bad as you almost need a guide for the main menu alone. Hellsinker is another one and I have brought it up in the past. Great game but man, ask anyone familiar with the game and you will learn that the games UI is half the battle of the games infamous learning curve.
And I would also like to add Metaphor: ReFantazio as another bad example, this time being one that is wildly overdone. It is like they took the positive reception of the P5 UI and decided to dial it up even more. It is just headache inducing.
Really good video on design. I actually feel compelled to watch your previous videos. Hopefully these candidates weren’t in your previous ones. Pseudoregalia and Another Crab’s Treasure are both, in my opinion, great games that show really good design choices ranging from teaching the player through the environment to easily understanding what attack an enemy is going to throw out through its animation.
One small complaint I have about the UI in Elden Ring (as I've been replaying it recently and it's reminded me). The damn "Somewhere, A Heavy Door Has Opened." UI message that pops up when you pull the lever to open the boss door in a dungeon. Every other message in the game comes up with a button prompt if you have to clear it yourself, and if it doesn't have one, the message will eventually fade. This message has NO BUTTON INDICATOR that it has to be cleared and it ALSO locks up your movements until you press the A button to clear it (or whatever it is on your controller/keyboard-mouse). It will stay on your screen until you press that button, there is no fadeout timer. You eventually start to remember to clear it, but I recall the first time I got the message when I first played the game I had to run away from a mob while figuring out which button cleared the damn notification. Especially because the Y button is typically the confirmation button and I'm pretty sure that one doesn't work (not playing currently to check).
You could also make a case for the map during launch, it was borderline primitive and had like almost no information. Or how the spirit ash are considered super important but everything about them is practically hidden to you, despite the fact you can buy hints from a vendor that stays in the place where you unlock it there is nothing to suggest that you can unlock it there.
You only touched on this, and perhaps it's too far outside the point of this video (sorry, I'm new to this series), but Balatro's sound design complements its visuals very well. I often refer to the whole kit & caboodle that Balatro does when a hand is played as "pageantry", and I'm not trying to be derisive there, I just don't know of a better way to describe all this stuff that isn't *strictly* speaking necessary for gameplay that nonetheless elevates the game beyond what it achieves via gameplay alone. But more to my point, I feel that sound design goes hand in hand with graphic design when it comes to the presentation of information, and I've seen bad sound design really detract from an otherwise fine UX. I feel it's worth being aware of how the two can synergize or be at odds at one another
This to me suggests a companion series, or perhaps a single spin off video, about the way sound design can complement user interface design, either in enhancing the experience, or in helping to aid navigation, with a flip side of games with atrocious sound design, which I suspect there will sadly be a pile of examples for. The trickiness is UA-cam copyright nonsense, depending, but I'm sure something could be figured out.
one game id love to see you go in depth on is pizza tower. specifically how the feed back of your character sprites both in the upper corner tv and of peppino and noise themselves tells you how good or shit you're doing, as well as how the different transformations show visually how they work
You should really make a video about "Should you fix the jank?" When is "jank" design part of the charm? how much junk is quirky fun identity that endears loyal fans of a game and when it's really just _bad_ for everyone?
I would love to see an episode talking about Sonic Heroes and how it keeps it clear who you are currently playing as. With 3 characters playable at all times it could be easy to lose track of what formation you're in, especially when changing formation. But I feel like the distinct sillouettes of each formation and the bold colors of the indicators in the top right of the screen always make it clear at a glance who you currently are.
Congrats to Doc for being the person to finally actually explain to me what Lethal Company is in a way that I can understand instead of doing what everyone else in my life and online has done and just assuming I know all about it already. Months of suffering ended. Holy shit. Even the game's own trailers did not do this. A tremendous burden has been lifted from my shoulders, and now that I know what I'm looking at I even understand how it might be... _fun._
A REALLY good one to talk about for an absolutely TERRIBLE design is Pokemon easy mode and challenge mode for Pokémon Black and White... "Congratulations! You have just completed the game! As a special reward, here is easy mode! HAVE FUN!!!" And if you think that's bad, don't worry, it gets MUCH WORSE! You see... easy mode lowers the level of your opponents pokemon, and decreases the Ai to make them dumber... while the hard mode increases their level, makes their Ai smarter, and switched up their teams, giving more Pokemon and items... This sounds good on paper until you realize one thing. Although the levels are changed, their stats are not. Because of this, the Pokemon in easy mode will give less experience and prize money after being defeated... while in hard mode they give more money and experience. In other words... battles in hard mode are easier than they are in easy mode because they over level your pokemon. Because of this, easy mode is actually the real challenge mode while hard mode is actually the easiest... right? Of course not! Instead, both versions are slightly more difficult than the base game in their own stupid ways! Easy mode does make trainer fights harder, yes, but not really since they have a less complex Ai... and Challenge mode does level you up faster, yes, but the trainers are still harder to due their pokemon having better items, movesets, and larger teams. So after you beat the entire game you unlock one of two different hard modes called "challenge" and "easy" that are barely harder than the original game entirely because of a programming oversight that made neither of thek function like their meant to... yay...
could you talk about reverse: 1999? The menus, places and sound design are beautiful and the navigation is shockingly easy to grasp even with tons and tons of different menus.
No real thoughts on the UI of any of these games (although my husband sometimes plays trackmania, I should link him to this video, see if he agrees with your assessment) but on this topic, one game's UX design I've been appreciating a lot lately is Cassette Beasts - One of the various pokemon-likes, this one is narrative focused, focuses on 2v2, super effective moves instead of being a damage mutipe gives a negative status effect to the enemy (and not very effective gives them a positive status effect. Also sometimes the status effect is neither positive nor negative but instead a type change - Using a fire move on an ice monster for example causes it to melt and become a water monster) Status effects are on a timer, defaulting to 3 - the same status applied again increases it by three, the opposite status decreases it by 3, which displays underneath the hp bar letting you keep track of a lot of status effects at once (because there are often a lot of status effects going on at once); the game's AP system is also very cleanly presented underneath the hp bar, your level is on the hp bar itself - and has two sections, your monster's hp and your hp since you're transformed into your monster so will take overflow damage if your monster is defeated, this is a red bar underneath the green bar for your monster. Your name is written next to your hp, helping you keep track of which monster is you (top) and your companion (bottom) - Given this is always the same in every fight this is probably unneeded but it's nice. The map is divided into squares, like a Zelda map (a lot of the game feels like you're playing Pokemon on a 2d Zelda map, complete with some of your captures giving you more navigation tools, like a pegasus boots equivalent or a grappling hook shot equivalent), and quests and rumours highlight either the exact square they're referring to or the range of squares if they're referring to an area, with an exclamation mark in the middle of them. When fused (the game's equivalent of a limit break system) the battle music, at least in significant battles, swaps the instrumental melody line for lyrics, the same is done in the main town in the game when you're inside. This both makes important fights where you want to use the limit break feel more significant and helps remind you if you're currently fused or unfused. And the game has this adorable small bit of polish - as well as a hp bar in the menu, the tapes the monsters are stored on slowly progress as they lose hp, and the item you use to heal monsters rewinds the tape, which you get to see visually happen (while the item you use to bring fainted monsters back is themed as one of those devices that respools a broken cassette tape) The art style of the game is also consistent enough that it's able to break the art style for a few specific very powerful boss battles which are thematically... Big, significant, concepts invented by humans. And the art style is consistent enough that the shifts in art style for these (plus some VHS tape distortion effects) makes every one of them feel fundamentally wrong in a really fun way that if the artstyle was less consistent with the rest of the game wouldn't work nearly as well. Think Omega Flowey in Undertale for the 'sudden shift in artstyle' effect I'm talking about. But do it multiple different times in entirely different ways for each of them.
I got Balatro for the switch, because I didn't have access to my pc at the time, and I think it succeeds in making it just as satisfying and natural to play on console, which is no small feat.
Right, of course. There's no such thing as universal bad design. Only generally bad design, and bad design for a specific project or purpose. Any design guideline can be broken succesfully if you understand what it's for.
I morbidly, but sincerely wonder what it would be if Cruelty Squad is included ine one of these videos. It most certainly would be the most memorable inclusion into the series though, no doubt.
as someone who's never been a fan of lethal company , i still think the ui design is pretty good ! decent at its worst , but generally pretty good ! helps establish the vibe of the game a little more i guess .
I think A Hat in Time has a good example of polish too. In the beta versions, there were very few particles when doing any kind of movement (sprinting, jumping, diving, etc.), and it looked kind of janky, but in the final release they added some dust/cloud particles which make the basic movement feel much, much more satisfying, in my opinion.
Hi ! I got recommended this video and as an UI Designer who worked on Trackmania I kinda feel like I have to defend myself ! This is the result of a huge turnover with basically a new design team every 4 to 5 months filled with junior and absolutely nobody to teach and help them (I personnaly got yeeted on the game with no history of what have been done, no documentation, no guidelines and had to figure out everything by myself and I wanted to leave guidelines for future designers when I left but they got tossed in the trash). I could go on and on about these issues at Nadeo but I hope people would me more vocal to these issues so Nadeo stop burning out designers. Loved your video and you got a new subscriber tho !
Yeah, I believe it. That sounds like the lifecycle of a lot of software projects, lol. It really is honestly better than previous Trackmania UIs, even if I think there are still problems. Thanks for working on it!
As someone who enjoyed the balatro demo... i never picked up the full game because i got sea sick from constantly swirling game background. And i like VR and dont tend to get motion sick, but everything is moving *just enough* to throw my body off
9:10 I personally would have to disagree. I've given up on several games if I couldn't understand the menu. It's mostly just a me problem but I have dyslexia and a hard time reading/understanding most menus and particularly chaotic ones like the one shown here where I can't even understand what I'm doing - I just can't. I would get way too overwhelmed and frustrated before I was even able to play it
hifi rushes background environment is so cool. Its a rhythm hack n slash crossover and so to fit the rhythm ascetic, the game made every object sync with the music.
I'm going to second this, it talks more about communication than graphic design. There's nothing useful said about the games graphic design here beyond base level observation.
I thought he was gonna talk more about the visual elements, like how the scanner can help you see things in the dark better for example, yet the indicators take up the screen and make it harder to see for a split second in exchange (especially the vain shrouds outside). Or how the font in the terminal and radar makes it just a bit more difficult to accurately see the letters you need when you need to open a door or disable a turret (cant tell you how many times I've struggled to open a door bc I cant tell if the letter is a "i", "j", "l" or "p", "o" etc). The cameras on the ship give you no useful info, even if you wanted to scan for threats beforehand you have to be super close to pick up the signal at which point you'd probably be able to see the threat with your own eyes instead, stuff like that. Its messy but it actually serves the game better. I thought thats what this video was gonna touch upon lol
I am so surprised anyone thinks Balatro had good UI/UX design. There were tabs and options I was figuring out hours after starting it because I didn't knwo they were buttons. At the same time, there's so many buttons and icons I keep on forgetting what they do. WTF is "Ante" or "Round" or "Blind"? There is no explanation anywhere, Googling didn't even help initially. And Balatro has polish?? Half of the card and status descriptions are incomprehensible until you use them and see what they do. Maybe the developer isn't a native English speaker? Most likely it's because they needed to shorten the descriptions so it fits the ugly aesthetic. So many details aren't explained until you try them: Why does adding multi to a card with a seal remove the seal? Does the glass card break before or after it's scored in a hand? 10:50 - The title screen looks like sh*t and again, feels like it's made by someone with dyslexia. QUIT goes LAST. Why are there 7 different font sizes and styles? This has the same issues that Trackmania has.
Here's a suggestion for bad design: having to hunt down the legendary Pokémon in Pokémon SV's Ingido Disk DLC. Even though there's an NPC that tells you what area to find them, the Pokémon are just plonked in mostly random spots with no regards for staging, which makes them hard to find. Plus, it doesn't feel meaningful to find and fight a legendary dragon when it's not even the tallest thing around sitting in the corner of some featureless mountain. It's a shame because previous Pokémon games did a really good job of this, framing legendary encounters as being the epic centerpiece of some pretty cool locations
SV was full of questionable decisions left and right. Not all of them negative--I question why they decided the story had to go so goddamn hard but I'm very glad they did, 10/10 made me sad for months--but other times it's just..why. why could we not pin the mini-map to north until the DLC? Why did they give us a perfectly good chime sound that played when a shiny was nearby in PLA only to not have it in the very next game? It also demonstrates why gameplay and story segregation is sometimes necessary. Veluza's dex entry more or less explains why it's hyper aggro all the time, but that doesn't make it a good time to have torpedo fish launching themselves at you every two seconds when you enter their territory (I actually really like Veluza; used one on my main team and the type combination and design are great, but oh god trying to find a shiny is hell on earth. I'd be better off just breeding for one)
personal submission for a future Bad Design: Baldurs Gate 3's relationship meter. The rest of the game is pretty good, but the relationship meter has a big problem. Can you guess what the following allied NPC thinks about the PC: |-----------😐---------------------------------| Cause that ^^^ is what a "neutral"-state looks like. Neutral is hanging around the quarter-point, half-way between the visual centre and "im out of here" which does not visually read as neutrality. Now i understand mechanically why that is. It's because the range runs from a the mild hostility of "this partnership isnt working so im going to risk the wilds alone" through "neutral", "trust" and ends at the extremely positive "have my babies". Which means that there is twice as much "positve" range then there is negative-emotion before the NPC just leaves. So mechanically that shows the range of relationships you can have pretty accurately. But looking at that bar, I cant help but feel like my allies secretly hate me.
Am i the only one who thought it felt a bit meanspirited to say that Lethal Company monsters are cliche and dumb? I get it was meant in a good way, but it still felt rough, especially considering Lethal Company plays it all straight. Like i dont understand whats supposed to be dumb about tbe ghost girl or how its "barely a step away from Slenderman", and stuff like the eyeless dogs and Bracken are just regular monsters
Yessss. More love for Balatro is always good. Everyone needs to play this stupid dopamine card game. Everyone thinks they know poker until a dude rolls up with five of a kind and a flush house.
The first 500 people to use my link will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare skl.sh/designdoc07241
You are on youtube how do you it's not a scam
@@nathanieljones8043maybe you need to increase your grammar skills with SkillShare™️
thanks! skillshare helped me alot agaisnt my LSD
One of my favorite design choices in Lethal recently is the truck and it's manual. You order the truck and everyone's first instinct is to hop in the driver seat and start it, neglecting the manual that sits in the back warning you about driving while in park and 95% of the time people's first experience is exploding the stupid thing
Well hey, at the very least you get a one-time lifetime warranty.
Lethal Company?
@@DeathnoteBBno, Lethal Corporation
@@skeletorthebest7204No, Lethal Country, where you play as an average North Korean citizen.
No, Lethal Calamari. It's the most risky meal, and no one is known to survive it
In Ballatro, there are several random elements of the UI that you can click and drag. This serves no purpose other than to be satisfying and make the UI feel alive. When im thinking or mad I grab the Blind Chip and move it around
i always try to line up the boss blind with the other circle on the screen before it burns up
I think the dev stated he made the blinds chip thingies movable so that if you’re mad at one (like the plant vs your eternal pareidolia) you can take your anger out by throwing it around
I had no idea you could do this wtf, I'm trying this later😂
you can do that? this game gets better and better
no way I have 200 hours and never knew this
As someone who's never played it, Trackmania got me with bad design in a way that wasn't even mentioned. At one point text popped up saying "WELCOME TO STLJNT" and it took me fully a minute to realize it said "STUNT"
What’s the problern
Yeah that U is almost as bad as stunt mode itself
Right, why the hell is that U stylized? The only thing that saves it is the tiny color bands at the top... but otherwise, it reads like some special promo club, like you entered the Le Mans competition section of Trackmania
Welcome to St. Louis Joint? Jaunt? Jelly Donut? Who knows!
Nadeo being Nadeo as per usual
I dont even need to hear the in game audio to laugh at the lethal company clips in the background, i can visualize it already
Especially the moment with the shotgun with being left with nothing to shoot in the current direction.
@@Fenyx_Birb Bang! Bang! Click! FUCK!
It should be noted that because the Lethal Company footage shown is modded, it actually provides better UX elements than what the base game offers. You mentioned being able to use cameras to see what your buddies are doing inside, but that’s exclusive to mods, not vanilla. Same with the loot value indicator at the bottom right.
What’s curious about Lethal Company is that the game does have *all* of the basic information in it, in terms of tutorials and what you need to learn. But all of it is hidden in throwable manuals, a barely audible speaker, and a computer with hidden inputs you can’t expect to know off the bat. This allowed the game to be built around the community of players and how they share their experience online, and it’s better off for that.
while a lot of the footage is modded, i think the main points still stand. and i feel like the camera one is semantics. in vanilla it's a radar map with more limited info (and extra info too) but its not that different from a camera (and the ship has 2 cameras on it that look outside)
the only difference with the map/camera thing is that the names are on the dots instead of being in the top corner, it makes no noticeable difference
the loot value thing is also just a streamlining thing
Is it better for that? Because I've rarely, if ever, seen people have fun unless it's offing themselves with the zombie mask on day 2. No one reads that basic info because they're too busy TRYING to die so they can stop playing.
@@deadersurvival4716 i dont know what you’ve watched but i think its safe to say a majority of people dont kill themselves so they can stop playing, its a game your free to exit from at any time so i’d bet most on purpose death is for the funny also if people didnt want to play it then why did the game do so well, also just to counter the “popular cause youtubers” arguement: among us hasnt been popular for like 2 years but its still got an active player base
@@Grand_Kaiserin_Elysium Aside from the plethora of examples I have of people who I played with, are you going to seriously, with a straight face, try to claim that most people didn't mimic Markiplier and his group doing THAT EXACT THING within only a few sessions?
And to be honest, I don't think that counters the "popular youtuber" argument? You realize that videos on the internet are nearly permanent, right? That UA-cam can, and will, offer you old videos if you've shown literally any interest in the subject matter or the creator themselves. Sure, the playerbase will get lower once they move on, but that doesn't change that they fundamentally change how we play video games, even for people who AREN'T in their fanbase. Just because a game has survived without those content creators doesn't mean that those content creators didn't leave an impact.
As for amogus specifically, that one is still at least somewhat common for top echelon Twitch streamers to this day. Try again.
10:55 “… the new unlocks’ exclamation [mark] icon is moving; not constantly, not dramatically, just a small punctuation”.
This pun hit me WAY too hard.
The pun-ctuation hit you hard?
@@jorgemtzb9359😭
@@jorgemtzb9359 it was a punch-uation, if you will
The series is back!!!
One thing I've always wanted to hear about is Enemy Sound Design. Having good design of it can let players instantly identify enemies without the need for visual contact, and that's amazing.
Salmon Run's Boss Salmonids all have extremely distinct sounds to them that makes it easy to tell when one of them is nesrby without ever having to see them. The sloshing of Steelheads, the clanking of Steel Eel jerrycans, the echoing pop Drizzler torpedoes make. It only ever takes me seconds to recognize when a Boss Salmonid spawns and what it is before I even get a visual on it. Talk about it!
I give it two hours before someobody sees this comment and brings up DMC and Bayonetta's enemy sound cues.
Always fun when a single sound hits you with the "oh god no" before you even turn around
I concur! When I think about Sound Design, I think about Overwatch and how it uses sounds to indicate a lot of things that players might not consciously think about, but still value keeping track of. Your guns will usually emit some sort of sound that’s unique to each weapon to indicate when they’re about to run out of ammo. Your ultimate ability makes a tiny charging-up sound when it’s fully charged. Enemy abilities and positions can often be tracked by split-second sound cues that experienced players will learn to pick up on (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve immediately ducked for cover after hearing the click of a Widowmaker’s heels on the ground OR the tink of her grappling hook latching onto a surface nearby). It’s all very neat stuff. I hope someone makes a video on it some day.
The same thing could be said about Lethal Company's sound design too. Each creature has a distinct sound it plays, except for the Bracken which is meant to sneak behind you. The Nutcracker will make mechanical footsteps and play Army music when provoked. The Barber, which was just added in the latest version, is completely invisible unless you're within 7 meters of it, but you know it's there because it plays a loud snare and horn note whenever it moves. Plus, the game takes advantage of using proximity chat, like having echoes when you're indoors, having a muffled voice when the snare flea (the game's version of a facehugger) attacks you. Even the ambient music that plays outside adds to the game's atmosphere, especially in single player.
Amid Evil nails that one!
You described lethal company perfectly, it’s like the dev would do whatever would cause a funny scenario. Everything that makes the game so all over the place was done for the pure sake of chaos and I love it.
It's becoming increasingly and inescapably obvious to more and more people that Lethal Company is not a horror game; it's a comedy game, with horror elements that provoke adrenaline responses to heighten emotions-just so the comedy is better punctuated. Slapstick, as it turns out, is very much something that can be engineered and provoked by an outside hand, and by putting players in a situation where the tools they have are pitifully inadequate for the task ahead of them (short of expert nutjobs who have figured out how to send Morse in wiggles to the terminal operator), those players will latch on to the zany humor elements present and elaborate on them. Moreover, a joke at a funeral that makes everyone laugh, even reluctantly, may not be all that good of a joke, but for those people who feel like they shouldn't be laughing to begin with, that joke feels like the most profoundly comedic wit simply because what else would make them laugh at a time like that? LC embodies that in its contrast, and is all the better for it.
dev singular
@@depressedtoaster887 Zeekers definitely got a bit of outside help even if in just small contributions from the community, plus the community-centrism of the game makes mods very common, as long as they improve the experience whilst keeping the horror-comedy spirit of the game
editing feedback: could you put the name of the games that are shown in b-roll in future videos? or all games shown in general? some of these games look nice to check out and there's usually no way to tell what they are without looking at the comments section
I second this, I feel like every video that covers multiple games should do this whenever possible. It just makes it so much easier to look up anything that seems interesting.
Edit: Ok, I just saw that he did include the games listed in the description at least. Though I would still say showing it on screen is probably better because so many people don’t even look at the description on videos unless they’re explicitly looking for something lol
@@ninja_tony And the games listed only are the ones talked about. If you see a one or two second clip of a game that piques your curiosity, good luck finding what it is. You will have to ask people to tell you what the name of the game is.
I've always thought it's a terrible design to not mention the games' names somewhere on screen, especially when the game capture doesn't even occupy the whole screen.
its in the description in the order in which they are shown
@@CrabGuyy They mean the games that only get a small clip during the introduction of each segment, those aren't listed
@@CrabGuyy The game at 14:20 is not listed in the description, and I really like the graphics and wanted to check it out :(
I'm sorry but I find it ironic that a series about presentation of information doesn't display the names of the games being shown on screen. It'd be kind of funny if the show itself was an example on Good design, Bad design. In any case, good episode!
lethal company and trackmania had their names shown
or rather told to you
It’s also in the description.
Sure, the featured games are said and labeled but there are many others shown that aren't. Including: the Lego game, the bubble game, Minishoot Adventures, Pokemon Violet/Scarlet, Animal Crossing New Horizon, Paper Mario TTYD, Neon White, Zelda Breath of the Wild, Smash Bros 4 Wii U, Monkey Ball Banana Rumble, and -that last one with the blue character- Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip.
Even though I recognize most of them, it's good to label them for anyone that's interested in the footage but doesn't know the name of the game.
all comments except this one got a like from the the author
Seems like you hit'em right n the balls lol
Thank you! I was actually looking through the comment section for Minishoot Adventures because it looked interesting yet didn't get mentioned by name
Low Skill Disease sounds like an actual disease from a litrpg light novel. Like if a character doesn't increase their level often enough, their health becomes poor.
"I Got Reincarnated With Low-Skill Disease?!"
@@kood995And then it turns out it's so low it underflowed into infinity and MC is just the strongest dude alive
@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 Nailed it. No weakness ever remains without being turned into an OP hack if it wasn't already one.
@@AnotherDuck gotta love isekais somehow going below the bottom of the barrel
and by love i mean LOATHE
@@AnotherDuckI mean, I'm slowly working on an isekai that'll probably never see the light of day which pretty much just sets up a basic set of weaknesses that aren't ever really going to stop being weaknesses, just grow less extreme (mc is a pseudo self-insert who really loved science, but could never quite make it into uni, ending up in a dead end factory job and learning for fun in his free time, before eventually working too much overtime, and making a lethal mistake [remember to check the papermill is actually, properly off before trying to fix any internal errors], and getting reincarnated with just his eclectic knowledge of science, politics, etc. and his average intelligence. He struggles with magic, social interactions, and applying his knowledge, and will only really become average at best in those areas [no super powerful magic, will still laugh when he's supposed to be serious and has no reason to laugh, will still make non-optimal decisions because he didn't figure out the optimal one till afterwards, and will still struggle to meet his own deadlines without assistance]), because while they're rare, those are the kind of isekai I enjoy, where the supporting cast is needed not simply to worship the mc, but to fill in the gaps left by those flaws and produce a well rounded cast. Of course, the mc will still have to grow, but that growth will primarily be finding ways to work around his flaws, not escape them or make them into a hack (he already has a hack in the scientific method, a modern understand of chemistry, and a world full of magic where a deeper understanding of the new laws of physics can bridge the gaps in his knowledge from a lack of formal education [and the world not always working identically, like black powder not working properly while flash paper does {charcoal is more endothermic and can't reach the requisite temperature}])
Feels like the Trackmania menus just have no hierarchy. Everything is on the same "level" and actively fighting against everything else for your attention. You don't know where to look, because everything looks the same. And to make matters worse, the other menus are scrolled with LB/RB, which only works if the menus themselves work. It's just a mess!
Also I don't think that not being able to see the timers is nitpicky - it's the one thing the game is about. It should do that well.
And iirc, TMNF was way more consistent (bearing that I've played maybe 5 hours in the past decade) and readable.
So it's not like they CAN'T do better (a sentiment that holds true for a lot of Ubisoft teams).
oh my god i skimmed through the video to see what was where and i saw lethal company on a bad design slot, was like, "really? what, is it 'good' bad design? " I WASNT BEING SERIOUS
My pet peeves when it comes to UI navigation are
1. Mandatory text scrolling with no option to make it instant.
2. Camera changes happening in between dialogue rather than during it.
3. Fade-ins and fadeouts that can't be skipped.
All these can make even simple tasks more tedious, especially if such tasks happen many, many times.
I'm looking at you, No Man's sky!
Cruelty Squad would be fun for a video, it's so completely jank, but the jank not only fits the game really well, but feels so satisfying to play with.
I've never played trackmania or seen the menu before, but wow the UI was giving me anxiety. How do you not get lost in there??
one thing i wanna add about the speed in balatro is that as the game scores your hand, it gradually speeds up
usually it is only just noticeable, but when doing some insane hands, it can get *really* fast. and in a way, i feel like it adds a sense of power to those hands.
you've made a hand so powerful that the score counting becomes nearly incomprehensible.
besides that, a nice touch in balatro that i really like is that whenever something happens, the game makes it really obvious. everything is (usually) accompanied by some audio and visual effect, as well as text.
Yeah, UI is about showing the right amount of information for the type of game in question, it's not a one size fits all. An example of that I remember is Onirism not having a timer for a self-destructing zone sequence in order to increase tension
Unsure how that worked in practice, but personally it'd have the opposite effect on me. No timer, prolly won't actually explode, right?
One of my favourite small details is when neon white lands on the ground the his face in the bottom left moves to sell that you landed which can be important for speedrunning to give an obvious indication that you landed on the ground because you have not wanted to.
oh yeah Neon White's UI is insanely good at portraying what little info they'd need to portray. It's still crazy to me just how intuitive the card system is at portraying what you have & how much is left
@@Triforce_of_Doom especially since, as a speed running game, you don’t have time to dwell on the info. You have to be able to get all the info you need at the quickest of glances.
@@erakfishfishfish yep. Also god I need to replay the game *stares at backlog of games I haven't beaten*
I do want to point something out about Balatro, all that movement makes a lot of people motionsick, myself included. For me, I just needed the backgrounds to stop swirling, but for some people, the movement of the cards makes them sick. The game was recently updated to allow a toggle for the backgrounds, but there still isn't one for the animations. Just some food for thought. The game's fantastic otherwise, but sometimes, a charming esthetic for some is a serious problem for others.
yeah, honestly, i think this video convinced me i don't want to play balatro until there's a setting or a mod to tone that down! the wobbly cards especially, and some of the informational boxes bobbing up and down while you're trying to read.... blegh .......
Came here to say that. Gives the same energy as actual video poker & digital slot machines, where everything is constantly moving & plinking. In a casino context, it's designed to keep you "engaged" and unable to focus/think about odds, or how much time is passing (or how much money you're losing).
Have heard the Balatro dev came from the other "gaming", and did this for a change. But that design style acts like a filter for users who are more susceptible to addictive behaviors & crave constant stimulation 😢
This UI is so busy it reminds me of the past trend of squiggly cartoons, Dr Katz for exemple.
I just couldn't watch them, and seeing Balatro here, it's a pass for me.
@@zephiiyros There's mods for it! And they're really easy to install too. I originally had a static baclgrounds mod installed before the offical option was out.
thats very interesting, i get really easily motion sick but its only for first-person games. turning off the moving backgrounds did wonders for me, but i'm glad theres mods for turning off other stuff! love balatro so much and id be pissed if i kept getting motion sick because of the design lol
i love this video, you explain things perfectly, you know the beauty of crudeness. and the NEED for small details, the small details are what build games. they really REALLY ARE what step up the asethetic!
I'm actually playing FFXIV while I listen to this, and when it opens with the Solution 9 music, I had to pause for a moment because I was in Limsa at the time.
yeah me too 😂i thought i closed the game and it made me look at my taskbar to make sure
I too had a double take when I heard the music!
i've been idling in solution nine for so long in between queues that the first few seconds i had to pause for a long long moment to process and realize i am not in fact in solution nine or even logged in
I was sitting here losing my mind knowing that I heard the music but couldnt remember where
For future bad design: the UI of Zenless Zone Zero really surprised me with how cumbersome it is. Despite not all that much info being needed, a lot of it is tucked away behind submenus that are accessed by an ever-changing array of button functions. Its probably okay on mobile, but on console it is a nightmare. A good example of looking polished but actually jank.
That's probably by design to trick people into spending money somehow. That's how it always is with those kinds of games.
@@stevethepocket Surpringly, no. They make getting to the cash shop very obvious, and even if you get very lost in the menus, there's still not really a way to spend money as those options always lead back to the cash shop. It's just inconsistencies that add up to a cluttered interface.
@@stevethepocket You say that but somehow the Hoyoverse games have 1 or 2 sections that are made for spending money, and those are always the button for the Games Gatcha currency and the games Shop. Both are easily accessed and not hidden behind some sceme.
But i gotta say ZZZ is very pretty but that menu is more confusing somehow than any other Hoyoverse game
Great video as always! Ideas:
- Good Design: Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime -
It has one of the smoothest experiences I've had in a game. The menus are simple and clear, and it's the only Switch games that lets you seamlessly connect any kind of controller or pair of joycons without freezing the game to pop open a separate UI menu like even most of Nintendo's games do. It's also just full of intuitive mechanics and simple visuals that keep everything clear and streamlined.
- Bad Design: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe -
Specifically, the kart selection screen, and especially when it comes to accessibility options like Auto Accelerate and Smart Steering. I frequently play with people who don't play many video games, yet these features meant to help them are completely hidden in a near-secret menu with specific button toggles and unlabeled symbols. It also takes a frankly ridiculous number of inputs to find and select the kart pieces you want. Unlike Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, connecting and changing controller setups always feels like a pain and that menu can be easy to accidentally open.
- Good Design: Unrailed! -
The menus are partially a tutorial, letting you walk around to select menu items, getting you familiar with the controls. They also require you to work cooperatively, which is the name of the game, because everyone has to stay on the menu item to select it and you can dash into other players to bump them around. Some might consider it bad design, but when the menus can be as fun as the game itself, it seems like a win in my book.
- Bad Design: Starlink: Battle for Atlas -
It may be a great explorative ship-combat space romp with excellent gameplay UI, but it has some of the clunkiest menus I've ever seen with button prompts scattered around with little proximity to the elements they actually interact with and seemingly little consistency from one menu to another. Even after dozens of hours, I still fumble with figuring out how to mod my ship then select a new weapon and mod that.
Additionally, the planetary maps are bafflingly bad. Planets have no north; as you rotate around the planet, the orientation changes, so if you go to find a landmark, then go back to find your ship, the planet's rotation has changed. This makes it almost impossible to develop any kind of mental familiarity with each planet's geography.
There's a typo in the title, "Deisgn".
I feel like I’ve been seeing a lot of typos in video titles lately
Good Design Bad Deisgn: UA-cam Titles
Keep it. Its perfect.
@@WrecklessFantasistmaybe to have more people commenting about it?
Looks like he fixed it
When making animations for a game, it's important to not just view the animation in a vacuum and instead take them in based on the context of the game as a whole - how often will a player see an animation? If they're going to see it multiple times over the course of a regular play session, optimizing it for being fast is good, and if you want to make more polished animations they should be for highlight moments. This is something that the RPG genre has tackled pretty extensively, with games of the 90s and 2000s often being subject of jokes because they can have full attack animations that are over a minute and you're expected to use every turn because they're the best moves in the game.
Yu-Gi-Oh is a game known for, some say notorious for, massive volatile combos. In the actual game you're given a five-minute timer in your turn and it's very common that a player will use up most of that time even on the first turn. But the thing is that the game also has animations for every action, and the animations do not impact the timer. What this results in is the "fifteen minute turn" statement. Is it true that players get fifteen minute turns, in a game with only five minutes on the clock? Actually, yes.
You can easily pop up clips from some of their goofy events like "you only have 30 seconds on the clock" and see turns that are easily over a minute, simply because the animations take so long. Some of the long animations are obvious, like excavation from the deck or the ridiculous chain link animation but even regular actions are not properly optimized for a smooth gameplay experience. And the issue is, since it's a game that is built specifically around multiplayer, you can't go into options and fix this.
The long turns are one of the biggest pain points of Yu-Gi-Oh as a card game and so it's a mistake to do anything that significantly adds to the turn length, even if it's on the surface making a game more polished. Everyone who has picked up Master Duel has probably at least one moment where they open a game with no turn 0 interaction and just stand up from the computer and do something else while the opponent combos, so making the presentation as smooth and non-obstructive to gameplay as possible is what is fit to purpose for that game.
Compare the speed of, for instance, a YGOPro replay with the speed of a Master Duel Replay - the only operant difference is EDOPro has LESS polish but the replays are way easier to watch because the animations are smoother and faster.
Chrono Ark is also a card game, a party-based deckbuilder roguelike, developed by a small team so it doesn't have many animations on character cards, but it has a few. Animations come in a few flavors, there's regular attack animations that play out in real time while you play cards and don't restrict any player action, there's some animations that play when certain conditions are triggered like buffs or combo attacks that do restrict your move for a second but are just as fast as the basic animations, and then there's the couple seconds-long cutin animations reserved for the character's most significant and powerful cards to punctuate when you're doing something really impactful, for instance the tank character designed around building a lot of barriers has a cutin for his Shield Bash skill that converts barrier to damage or a support character with a very powerful but situational once-per-battle skill has a cutin that activates when it's used.
I'm so glad someone's finally talking about Trackmania's terrible, awful UI
Finally, I missed this series Edit: for next ep what about Hades 2 and how chronos can keep you from pausing
Please don't spoil a game that's not officially been out yet! I've been desperately avoiding spoilers form early access but people keep commenting them in places I can't control lol...
@@ThePaulineu oh, sorry, I swear I forgot about how it's been "out" for ages now and that the info was everywhere. Game itself is technically out on steam (Early Access but damn it's already pretty much a full game)
@@ravenstales6457 Yeah that's why it's complicated, I've tried blocking out all the hashtags and everything but youtube won't let me block words... It's less your fault and more UA-cam's fault for not giving us that option! But yeah it's good to keep in mind that many people don't play games in early access and want to avoid spoilers!
@@ThePaulineu I didn't realize it was really a spoiler, unless you wanna be absolutely blind to everything about it
9:30 PLEASE change, Nadeo. Keep in mind that mods don't work on console, and it's VERY annoying that things like an action key indicator need a mod. (Not that the game makes any effort at all to explain what Action Keys even are...)
Cruelty squad is a really great example of "Good bad design"
As much as I enjoy the game, Bear and Breakfast's menus drives me crazy at times. It feels like it would work pretty well on PC, where you can click and drag items and scroll through menus, but I play it on the Switch, where the navigation is much less intuitive. The "layers" of the menus are really confusing. I hate having to press a separate button to navigate to a section directly above where I'm currently at instead of simply pressing "up".
I'm pretty sure the Switch version is missing an update for sorting crafting recipes too, which makes the process of scrolling through the entire list just to get to the one item, all the way down on the bottom that you wanted to make, a real hassle.
The game is great, but the Switch version of menu navigation could do with an overhaul.
I dont think you actually know what vanilla lethal company is like because it doesn't have cameras, and the plethora of messy cosmetics and emote mods heavily decreases the value of the game's visual design. This makes the actual game pretty poorly represented in your footage.
no orange justice meme dance rubberross fumo 32+ player x-ray vision mods = literally unplayable
He doesn’t once mention the mods though, and I think lethals modding community is prevalent enough that people who have never played the game knows that the cosmetics are obviously mods.
@@SlimeyEmeralds that assumes people even keep up with the community in the first place which they most likely wont if they dont play it
Cruelty squad should probably win the award for "good bad design"
About damn time!! This is my favourite series of the channel ❤
Lethal Company is such an incredible game solely because it’s so awful communicatively, I’m glad you recognize how genius it is!
Splatoon 3 has mostly fantastic UI. But one bit of inconsistency has always bugged me.
Normally during a match, when ingo appears in big bold letters to mention things happening in the game, the colour of the font matches the team that benefitted from what just happened.
If you your teammate got a checkpoint the notice will be in your colour. If an enemy scored on your basket, it will be in their colour. Any time the leading team changes its alerted.
With how fast paced S3 is, this is really nice because even if u don't have time to read, u can see the colour, and gleam the rest from context.
EXCEPT FOR WIPEOUTS. A Wipeout is when all the players on 1 team are dead (what league of legends calls an Ace). This text js rhe only one that breaks that rule. It will ALWAYS be your colour, but with either black or white highlights. I can never remember which one is which, and I've had many times where I trade kills and see the thing pop up, and idk which team just went down. Sure there are other indicators, but the inconsistently of that one notification has always annoyed .e.
Same. Whenever a WIPEOUT pops up, I'm like "but I'm still alive! *looks up* Oh."
After a couple weeks, I finished watching all the videos on your channel. It was pretty entertaining! Learned some interesting things as well. The videos feel very professional but at times pretty casual, which results in a nice experience!
Also, I was never bothered by the sponsored bits. Usually the introduction to them is done pretty well and sometimes I was even glad the videos got sponsored.
I hope more people find your channel. You don't need to be interested in making games in order to have a great time learning facts about the design behind them and some cool tricks about game design.
Zelda Breath of the Wild, Wii U edition, when you play on a smaller CRT TV screen, the smaller text is not upsized to make up for the smaller blurrier screen, so you can't read anything. Taking into account different available resolutions is also part of good graphics design, I think
despite the fact it is supposed to be 4:3 in my setting option, which worked perfectly for all other games except this one, where they seemed to have assumed everyone plays in 16:9
Small text is the bane of my existence, and it’s 2-fold. PC game devs use tiny fonts because they assume people will play with their fces a foot from a large monitor, but I’m usually playing on my steam deck. Also, ever since HD became the norm, fonts have gotten smaller. It’s annoying.
when i think of bad design, I think of Wurthering Waves MENU SYSTEM. What a terrible UI. The washed out colours and similar symbols are confusing, and indistinguishable. The marks that tell you to do something never go away and are odd colours. There are too many nested menus with jargon; With not enough contrast to tell what you've selected. the controller wheel holds to much information. There is too much information, and it's poorly organized. It's a disaster.
I definitely think that UI design is often overlooked. A good UI can improve your experience without you even knowing it.
P.S. Love your content Doc!
Good design. Foes with unique gameplay and style that feel like a fun puzzle finding how they work.
Bad design. Level sliders
Aw heck, I feel like I got spoiled about "a little to the left". You sure included a lot of examples of puzzle solutions.
Honestly all these videos have inspired me to finally make my dream game, see you in a year or two if it works out :)
Some games that could go here would be the games by Project Moon. They are often interesting experiments with some stellar writing but often suffer in their UI design. Limbus Company is especially bad as you almost need a guide for the main menu alone.
Hellsinker is another one and I have brought it up in the past. Great game but man, ask anyone familiar with the game and you will learn that the games UI is half the battle of the games infamous learning curve.
And I would also like to add Metaphor: ReFantazio as another bad example, this time being one that is wildly overdone. It is like they took the positive reception of the P5 UI and decided to dial it up even more. It is just headache inducing.
Balatro and Lethal Company? I feel like the thumbnail is catering to a specific audience lol
Really good video on design. I actually feel compelled to watch your previous videos. Hopefully these candidates weren’t in your previous ones. Pseudoregalia and Another Crab’s Treasure are both, in my opinion, great games that show really good design choices ranging from teaching the player through the environment to easily understanding what attack an enemy is going to throw out through its animation.
That Dawntrail OST at the start hitting me in the heart...
One small complaint I have about the UI in Elden Ring (as I've been replaying it recently and it's reminded me).
The damn "Somewhere, A Heavy Door Has Opened." UI message that pops up when you pull the lever to open the boss door in a dungeon. Every other message in the game comes up with a button prompt if you have to clear it yourself, and if it doesn't have one, the message will eventually fade. This message has NO BUTTON INDICATOR that it has to be cleared and it ALSO locks up your movements until you press the A button to clear it (or whatever it is on your controller/keyboard-mouse). It will stay on your screen until you press that button, there is no fadeout timer.
You eventually start to remember to clear it, but I recall the first time I got the message when I first played the game I had to run away from a mob while figuring out which button cleared the damn notification. Especially because the Y button is typically the confirmation button and I'm pretty sure that one doesn't work (not playing currently to check).
You could also make a case for the map during launch, it was borderline primitive and had like almost no information.
Or how the spirit ash are considered super important but everything about them is practically hidden to you, despite the fact you can buy hints from a vendor that stays in the place where you unlock it there is nothing to suggest that you can unlock it there.
You only touched on this, and perhaps it's too far outside the point of this video (sorry, I'm new to this series), but Balatro's sound design complements its visuals very well. I often refer to the whole kit & caboodle that Balatro does when a hand is played as "pageantry", and I'm not trying to be derisive there, I just don't know of a better way to describe all this stuff that isn't *strictly* speaking necessary for gameplay that nonetheless elevates the game beyond what it achieves via gameplay alone. But more to my point, I feel that sound design goes hand in hand with graphic design when it comes to the presentation of information, and I've seen bad sound design really detract from an otherwise fine UX. I feel it's worth being aware of how the two can synergize or be at odds at one another
This to me suggests a companion series, or perhaps a single spin off video, about the way sound design can complement user interface design, either in enhancing the experience, or in helping to aid navigation, with a flip side of games with atrocious sound design, which I suspect there will sadly be a pile of examples for. The trickiness is UA-cam copyright nonsense, depending, but I'm sure something could be figured out.
one game id love to see you go in depth on is pizza tower. specifically how the feed back of your character sprites both in the upper corner tv and of peppino and noise themselves tells you how good or shit you're doing, as well as how the different transformations show visually how they work
You should really make a video about "Should you fix the jank?" When is "jank" design part of the charm? how much junk is quirky fun identity that endears loyal fans of a game and when it's really just _bad_ for everyone?
I would love to see an episode talking about Sonic Heroes and how it keeps it clear who you are currently playing as. With 3 characters playable at all times it could be easy to lose track of what formation you're in, especially when changing formation. But I feel like the distinct sillouettes of each formation and the bold colors of the indicators in the top right of the screen always make it clear at a glance who you currently are.
Congrats to Doc for being the person to finally actually explain to me what Lethal Company is in a way that I can understand instead of doing what everyone else in my life and online has done and just assuming I know all about it already. Months of suffering ended. Holy shit. Even the game's own trailers did not do this. A tremendous burden has been lifted from my shoulders, and now that I know what I'm looking at I even understand how it might be... _fun._
bad design : when your trailer fails to explain their game in a way that transmits the potential fun factor and avoid months of suffering
That Solution 9 music jumped right out at me lol
Great theme, gave FF14 some Phantasy Star vibes
A REALLY good one to talk about for an absolutely TERRIBLE design is Pokemon easy mode and challenge mode for Pokémon Black and White...
"Congratulations! You have just completed the game! As a special reward, here is easy mode! HAVE FUN!!!"
And if you think that's bad, don't worry, it gets MUCH WORSE! You see... easy mode lowers the level of your opponents pokemon, and decreases the Ai to make them dumber... while the hard mode increases their level, makes their Ai smarter, and switched up their teams, giving more Pokemon and items... This sounds good on paper until you realize one thing. Although the levels are changed, their stats are not. Because of this, the Pokemon in easy mode will give less experience and prize money after being defeated... while in hard mode they give more money and experience. In other words... battles in hard mode are easier than they are in easy mode because they over level your pokemon. Because of this, easy mode is actually the real challenge mode while hard mode is actually the easiest... right?
Of course not! Instead, both versions are slightly more difficult than the base game in their own stupid ways! Easy mode does make trainer fights harder, yes, but not really since they have a less complex Ai... and Challenge mode does level you up faster, yes, but the trainers are still harder to due their pokemon having better items, movesets, and larger teams.
So after you beat the entire game you unlock one of two different hard modes called "challenge" and "easy" that are barely harder than the original game entirely because of a programming oversight that made neither of thek function like their meant to... yay...
could you talk about reverse: 1999? The menus, places and sound design are beautiful and the navigation is shockingly easy to grasp even with tons and tons of different menus.
Thanks for adding captions!
bruh i started playing Balatro this week and now I can't stop seeing it, its taking over my life
A friend told me about Balatro back during Next Fest in October, and my life never recovered.
Turn the left card into the right card
No real thoughts on the UI of any of these games (although my husband sometimes plays trackmania, I should link him to this video, see if he agrees with your assessment) but on this topic, one game's UX design I've been appreciating a lot lately is Cassette Beasts - One of the various pokemon-likes, this one is narrative focused, focuses on 2v2, super effective moves instead of being a damage mutipe gives a negative status effect to the enemy (and not very effective gives them a positive status effect. Also sometimes the status effect is neither positive nor negative but instead a type change - Using a fire move on an ice monster for example causes it to melt and become a water monster)
Status effects are on a timer, defaulting to 3 - the same status applied again increases it by three, the opposite status decreases it by 3, which displays underneath the hp bar letting you keep track of a lot of status effects at once (because there are often a lot of status effects going on at once); the game's AP system is also very cleanly presented underneath the hp bar, your level is on the hp bar itself - and has two sections, your monster's hp and your hp since you're transformed into your monster so will take overflow damage if your monster is defeated, this is a red bar underneath the green bar for your monster. Your name is written next to your hp, helping you keep track of which monster is you (top) and your companion (bottom) - Given this is always the same in every fight this is probably unneeded but it's nice.
The map is divided into squares, like a Zelda map (a lot of the game feels like you're playing Pokemon on a 2d Zelda map, complete with some of your captures giving you more navigation tools, like a pegasus boots equivalent or a grappling hook shot equivalent), and quests and rumours highlight either the exact square they're referring to or the range of squares if they're referring to an area, with an exclamation mark in the middle of them.
When fused (the game's equivalent of a limit break system) the battle music, at least in significant battles, swaps the instrumental melody line for lyrics, the same is done in the main town in the game when you're inside. This both makes important fights where you want to use the limit break feel more significant and helps remind you if you're currently fused or unfused. And the game has this adorable small bit of polish - as well as a hp bar in the menu, the tapes the monsters are stored on slowly progress as they lose hp, and the item you use to heal monsters rewinds the tape, which you get to see visually happen (while the item you use to bring fainted monsters back is themed as one of those devices that respools a broken cassette tape)
The art style of the game is also consistent enough that it's able to break the art style for a few specific very powerful boss battles which are thematically... Big, significant, concepts invented by humans. And the art style is consistent enough that the shifts in art style for these (plus some VHS tape distortion effects) makes every one of them feel fundamentally wrong in a really fun way that if the artstyle was less consistent with the rest of the game wouldn't work nearly as well. Think Omega Flowey in Undertale for the 'sudden shift in artstyle' effect I'm talking about. But do it multiple different times in entirely different ways for each of them.
Sorry, but what is the game at 0:18? I love the art and animation and it just looks really cute and fun. Sorta like a Galaga but free roam
Minishoot' Adventures
I got Balatro for the switch, because I didn't have access to my pc at the time, and I think it succeeds in making it just as satisfying and natural to play on console, which is no small feat.
Right, of course. There's no such thing as universal bad design. Only generally bad design, and bad design for a specific project or purpose. Any design guideline can be broken succesfully if you understand what it's for.
I morbidly, but sincerely wonder what it would be if Cruelty Squad is included ine one of these videos. It most certainly would be the most memorable inclusion into the series though, no doubt.
yayyy return of the king!! missed this series!
So good to see the series is back! Good Design Bad Design got me through University.
Looove this series! Sooo happy that it continues! :)
FOR THE COMPANY!
So glad to see this series back
The return of the king, I love this series
as someone who's never been a fan of lethal company , i still think the ui design is pretty good ! decent at its worst , but generally pretty good ! helps establish the vibe of the game a little more i guess .
I think A Hat in Time has a good example of polish too. In the beta versions, there were very few particles when doing any kind of movement (sprinting, jumping, diving, etc.), and it looked kind of janky, but in the final release they added some dust/cloud particles which make the basic movement feel much, much more satisfying, in my opinion.
I didn't know Lethal company had Nia and Mio hairstyles as mods!
Thats cute i'm gonna download them
its VERY important you mention when a game you're showing is modded or not
Hi !
I got recommended this video and as an UI Designer who worked on Trackmania I kinda feel like I have to defend myself !
This is the result of a huge turnover with basically a new design team every 4 to 5 months filled with junior and absolutely nobody to teach and help them (I personnaly got yeeted on the game with no history of what have been done, no documentation, no guidelines and had to figure out everything by myself and I wanted to leave guidelines for future designers when I left but they got tossed in the trash).
I could go on and on about these issues at Nadeo but I hope people would me more vocal to these issues so Nadeo stop burning out designers.
Loved your video and you got a new subscriber tho !
Yeah, I believe it. That sounds like the lifecycle of a lot of software projects, lol. It really is honestly better than previous Trackmania UIs, even if I think there are still problems. Thanks for working on it!
As someone who enjoyed the balatro demo... i never picked up the full game because i got sea sick from constantly swirling game background.
And i like VR and dont tend to get motion sick, but everything is moving *just enough* to throw my body off
You can turn off the constant motion in the current build if you need to.
Yaay it's back! Thanks a lot, love this series!
5:30 When the trackmania ost began I thought it was going to be in the bad design.
:D
honestly i smiled so much at the FFXIV Solution 9 music in the intro!
9:10 I personally would have to disagree. I've given up on several games if I couldn't understand the menu. It's mostly just a me problem but I have dyslexia and a hard time reading/understanding most menus and particularly chaotic ones like the one shown here where I can't even understand what I'm doing - I just can't. I would get way too overwhelmed and frustrated before I was even able to play it
But that's alright, I'm not really into racing games.
hifi rushes background environment is so cool. Its a rhythm hack n slash crossover and so to fit the rhythm ascetic, the game made every object sync with the music.
the lethal company part was good but i don't see what it has to do with "graphic design" you just talk about the game mechanics the entire time
I'm going to second this, it talks more about communication than graphic design. There's nothing useful said about the games graphic design here beyond base level observation.
it's probably a bit difficult to talk about graphic design when you've installed multiple cosmetic and fortnite dance mods
I did notice that
I thought he was gonna talk more about the visual elements, like how the scanner can help you see things in the dark better for example, yet the indicators take up the screen and make it harder to see for a split second in exchange (especially the vain shrouds outside). Or how the font in the terminal and radar makes it just a bit more difficult to accurately see the letters you need when you need to open a door or disable a turret (cant tell you how many times I've struggled to open a door bc I cant tell if the letter is a "i", "j", "l" or "p", "o" etc). The cameras on the ship give you no useful info, even if you wanted to scan for threats beforehand you have to be super close to pick up the signal at which point you'd probably be able to see the threat with your own eyes instead, stuff like that.
Its messy but it actually serves the game better. I thought thats what this video was gonna touch upon lol
I am so surprised anyone thinks Balatro had good UI/UX design.
There were tabs and options I was figuring out hours after starting it because I didn't knwo they were buttons.
At the same time, there's so many buttons and icons I keep on forgetting what they do.
WTF is "Ante" or "Round" or "Blind"? There is no explanation anywhere, Googling didn't even help initially.
And Balatro has polish?? Half of the card and status descriptions are incomprehensible until you use them and see what they do. Maybe the developer isn't a native English speaker? Most likely it's because they needed to shorten the descriptions so it fits the ugly aesthetic.
So many details aren't explained until you try them: Why does adding multi to a card with a seal remove the seal? Does the glass card break before or after it's scored in a hand?
10:50 - The title screen looks like sh*t and again, feels like it's made by someone with dyslexia. QUIT goes LAST. Why are there 7 different font sizes and styles? This has the same issues that Trackmania has.
I saw some footage of Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip at the end there!
Here's a suggestion for bad design: having to hunt down the legendary Pokémon in Pokémon SV's Ingido Disk DLC. Even though there's an NPC that tells you what area to find them, the Pokémon are just plonked in mostly random spots with no regards for staging, which makes them hard to find. Plus, it doesn't feel meaningful to find and fight a legendary dragon when it's not even the tallest thing around sitting in the corner of some featureless mountain. It's a shame because previous Pokémon games did a really good job of this, framing legendary encounters as being the epic centerpiece of some pretty cool locations
SV was full of questionable decisions left and right. Not all of them negative--I question why they decided the story had to go so goddamn hard but I'm very glad they did, 10/10 made me sad for months--but other times it's just..why. why could we not pin the mini-map to north until the DLC? Why did they give us a perfectly good chime sound that played when a shiny was nearby in PLA only to not have it in the very next game?
It also demonstrates why gameplay and story segregation is sometimes necessary. Veluza's dex entry more or less explains why it's hyper aggro all the time, but that doesn't make it a good time to have torpedo fish launching themselves at you every two seconds when you enter their territory (I actually really like Veluza; used one on my main team and the type combination and design are great, but oh god trying to find a shiny is hell on earth. I'd be better off just breeding for one)
personal submission for a future Bad Design:
Baldurs Gate 3's relationship meter. The rest of the game is pretty good, but the relationship meter has a big problem.
Can you guess what the following allied NPC thinks about the PC:
|-----------😐---------------------------------|
Cause that ^^^ is what a "neutral"-state looks like. Neutral is hanging around the quarter-point, half-way between the visual centre and "im out of here" which does not visually read as neutrality.
Now i understand mechanically why that is. It's because the range runs from a the mild hostility of "this partnership isnt working so im going to risk the wilds alone" through "neutral", "trust" and ends at the extremely positive "have my babies". Which means that there is twice as much "positve" range then there is negative-emotion before the NPC just leaves. So mechanically that shows the range of relationships you can have pretty accurately.
But looking at that bar, I cant help but feel like my allies secretly hate me.
shadowheart
I would be interested in your thoughts about the design elements in Cruelty Squad
thank you gorbino from the hit game gorbino's quest
Am i the only one who thought it felt a bit meanspirited to say that Lethal Company monsters are cliche and dumb? I get it was meant in a good way, but it still felt rough, especially considering Lethal Company plays it all straight. Like i dont understand whats supposed to be dumb about tbe ghost girl or how its "barely a step away from Slenderman", and stuff like the eyeless dogs and Bracken are just regular monsters
Balatro has got to be a GOTY contender
When the company is lethal
She lethal on my company till I meet quota
Perhaps the real Lethal Company was the cosmic horror that we fed along the way.
~We looove the comPANNYYY!!!~
@@Bupboy great assets, great great assets
Yessss. More love for Balatro is always good. Everyone needs to play this stupid dopamine card game.
Everyone thinks they know poker until a dude rolls up with five of a kind and a flush house.
Fun animation curve fact! To make something feel dramatic or heavy, just reverse the rule(Slow-fast-slow to Fast-slow-fast).
I started this video with headphones in while sitting in Solution Nine and got really confused how my TV speakers got so loud of nowhere
I will watch this video with the royal dignity that it deserves. I MISSED THIS SERIES SO MUCH.
i think little gator's game graphics does a PHENOMENAL job of matching the silliness and playfulness of the story. i recommend checking it out :D
“Animating with Ease” is a really clever course title lol
I've never heard of A Little To The Left, and now I really want to play it, it sounds super satisfying.
yeah it's back! love this series.
if you want a weirdass game, cruelty squad is good to look at if you havent already
Was nice and happy when I seen one of these uploaded.