Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 8
User Interfaces
The user interface (UI) creates the player's experience, making the game visible,
audible, and playable. It has an enormous effect on whether the player perceives
the game as satisfying or disappointing, elegant or graceless, fun or frustrating.
In this chapter, you'll learn the general principles of user interface design and a
process for designing your interface, along with some ideas about how to manage
its complexity. We'll then look at two key concepts related to game interfaces:
interaction models and camera models . After that we'll delve into specifics, examining
some of the most widely used visual and audio elements in video game UI and ana-
lyzing the functionality of various types of input devices. Because the overwhelming
majority of video games include some notion of moving characters or vehicles
around the game world, we'll consider a variety of navigation mechanisms as they
are implemented in different camera models and with different input devices. The
chapter concludes with a few observations on how to make your game
customizable.
NOTE To see repre-
sentative examples
of screen layouts suit-
able for different game
genres, read the chap-
ters in Part Two, “The
Genres of Games,” that
discuss the genres.
What Is the User Interface?
What works is better than what looks good. The looks good can change, but what
works, works.
—R AY K AISER E AMES , D ESIGNER AND A RCHITECT
NOTE When you
design the core me-
chanics, you should
avoid making choices
that depend on the
performance charac-
teristics of particular
input/output (I/O)
devices. Let the UI
manage the hardware,
and keep the internals
of the game hardware-
independent. If you
later port the game to
another machine, you
will only have to re-
design the UI, not the
core mechanics.
As you saw in Figure 2.1, the UI lies between the player and the internals of the
game. The UI knows all about any supported input and output hardware. It trans-
lates the player's input—the button-presses (or other actions) in the real world—
into actions in the game world according to the interaction model (see Chapter 1,
“Games and Video Games”), passing on those actions to the core mechanics, and
it presents the internal data that the player needs in each situation in visible and
audible forms.
This chapter refers to the outputs as the visual elements and audio elements of the
user interface and to the inputs as the control elements . When the game gives impor-
tant information to the player about his activities, the state of the game world, or
the state of his avatar (such as the amount of health or money he has), we say that
it gives feedback to the player—that is, it informs him of the effects of his actions.
The visual and audio elements of the user interface that provide this information
are called feedback elements .
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