I had a lot of fun talking to y'all about menus yesterday, and interesting designs we have seen over the years. I wanted to talk about it more in a slightly more structured way so others may chime in as well.
The first topic is actively hostile / diagetic UI design purposefully put into games and examples of it.
As a beginning example, while not too hostile I love Nier;Automata's skill menu. It's diagetic and clear while still being interesting as a mechanic itself.
spoilers for void stranger: (like seriously)
So void stranger has a cool ui gimmick in that it looks very simple. UI at the bottom highlighting various stats such as your lives and the room number. What you can later learn is that the UI is made up entirely of manipulable objects that you can pick up and put down at will (the puzzle gameplay is based around moving floor tiles) and you can use this to do various things in the game and i think its cool :3
On the topic of hostile (and straight up vomit inducing) UI elements
Cruelty Squad
(it is also diegetic )
while i think hostile game design (in this case UI) are interesting i find cruelty squad one to be distinctly different : it not a UI at first glance , and never try to be one
it serve the purpose but it lack the appearance so to speak .
it is not skeumorphique to the Platonic ideal of an UI .
bear with me cause this present text is an attempt at writing down an monologue/rant/autismo dump i had earlier today
can you picture an apple ? Not the one you may had earlier , but the one you could have tomorrow . an apple that bear not the history of an individual apple , the perfect apple ,the abstract objective apple , the platonic apple .
while we can never reach the platonic apple ,the more experience you might have the more you know what an apple is conceptually and because human share their experience ,the more the collective unconsciousness know the platonic apple .
Well Nature is not the only thing maker in this world , we too make instance of platonic object manifest for our uses . take the humble door for example .
the door (as a concept) is separator between two defined spaces that can be open or closed .
so when we design a door , we create a unique instance of that door . The choice we make are in the pursuit of doorhood , the method that we use to then build the door are defined by the design and thus it dooriness .
at the end of that process we have something that look like a door, quack like a door and taste like a door .
the door is skeumorphique (as in look like it real counterpart ) to the ideal door (bamboozled it look like the perfect door) . Because if it not , then it fail at being a door or at least it a bad one (perhaps i hard to open and close , perhaps it impractical for other reason) .
there is no platonic video game
and thus the design of game cannot be objectively bad , for you cannot make a game that is skeumorphique (in the meaning that is used presently) .
you as designer have intention , and you use methods with those intentions embedded in them , and you implement them within the constraint of those intention .
but the player ,the player does not have access to the intention only the promise that made them play the game . a player will have a method of play conditioned by those promises .
if a game genre become sufficiently present in the collective unconscious then there will be an platonic ideal of that .
Ui is nothing but purpose , it in its name . i will go as far than a UI that isnāt comfortable ,that isnāt useful ,that isnāt practical is an Bad UI period .
for hostile UI to exist , you have to thread the line between being a practical and useful UI that does it job perfectly while at the same time hurting (without annoying !) the player .
and that where cruelty squad come in : it doesnāt look like a UI ,it doesnāt quack like a UI and yet it serve the same purpose : by deliberate being nothing like a UI the user doesnāt rely on it with the same automatism and thus cannot be critique for it UIness .
I think if we were to build a platonic āhostlile non-ui ,sike actualy an Uiā it should be one with rules and code of it own ,with embedded within them is the information typically found in UI . the hostility would become the mini-puzzle game that is understanding wtf you are reading .
think for instance of math squible or alien language : as long as you donāt know the rules (or canāt see them) it just decorative symbols , but the moment your brain recognise it as an language it will treat it as such .
very interesting read! definite food for thought.
this is such a cool idea! i would love to play a game where part of it is just deciphering the rules and objectives. e.g., like you said, an alien on a spaceship except everything, including the UI, is in an alien language. the player has to rely on context clues and their own power of interpretation to figure things out. i'm feeling inspired to make something like this (though i'll have to learn how to make a game first though, lol)
a game is a set of rules that defined the interaction between an abstract and the player . if you want to make a game try prototyping it with pen and paper ,the rules donāt have to be set in stone at first just to get the feels .
if you want to make a game about decyphering text to operate a spaceship (for example) start by making the language ,insure it self-consistent . then take a page and draw things on it .
a mechanisme that might work is making word on little paper , and have on the pages slots to put them ,then at the end of a turn do what you defined the word+operator combinaison to do . that would require an efty bit of planning but that one way to start game designing without having to do engine stuff .
then if you want to go the video game route , take an engine and recreate your protorype in it and little by little code the automations .
the best thing about learning to make games is that best way to learn is just doing it .
thank you for the ideas! i hadn't thought of pen and paper. you're right, the best way to learn is to start. :)
You might find it useful to try āChants of Senaarā
If the idea of a āhostile UIā is one where you are deprived of information on how to use it and left to decipher the UI on your own, this game feels very much up that alley. Iāve been meaning to try it myself for awhile, but, from what I understandā¦ You are basically dropped into a land where you donāt understand the language and you are to parse it by talking to people during your quest. The UI looks like this
