Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
working on a futuristic title, there's no question that the interface should be futuristic
as well.
As the best interface is the one which the player doesn't even notice, many deve-
lopers agree that the UI is secondary to the artworks of a game. Always create inter-
faces that are consistent with the other artwork of your product and that complement
them. If you design an intrusive interface, it will pop out of the screen and distract the
players from the engagement of playing your title.
More on vectors and rasters
ics for Mobile
. We are now going to delve into the details of these drawing techniques
with specific regard to UI design.
The variability of screen sizes and resolutions that (from a game developer perspect-
ive) affects mobile devices, especially Android smartphones, requires specific tech-
niques to design game interfaces to deal with such variability.
The risk that must be avoided at all costs is that you need to redesign the game in-
terface every time you target a new device for your game, as scaling up or down an
interface can be very problematic.
As we already said, when creating graphics for games, there are two options avail-
able: drawing pixel by pixel (raster graphics) or drawing with curves and gradients
(vector graphics). Vector graphics result in lighter files but they are less efficient for
real-time graphics, as vectors must be converted into raster before they can be dis-
played on screen. Raster graphics, on the other hand, don't need such conversion,
resulting in better game performance.
The important thing here is that vector graphics can be scaled, while rasters cannot.
A good solution to address the problem of scaling the game interface to adapt to
different devices is to create a basic template for your game UI using vector graph-
ics and working with dedicated software, such as Adobe Illustrator. Scale vectors as
needed, until you find the size that best fits the needs of your game.
Then convert vectors into rasters (bitmap, JPEG, or PNG file formats) as you move
to the actual interface for the game. This procedure will help you save time and
money, should a new device become available with different screen size\resolution,
