Masahiro Sakurai on the importance of easy-to-understand UI
See what I mean?
Masahiro Sakurai is back with yet another installment in his game development video series, and this feature slots into the “User Interface” category.
Sakurai says that whenever possible, it’s best to make your menus understandable even without the use of words. Sakurai is quite the master at this, and in this video he shares some tips that will help you get a bit closer to this ideal.
Finding the right kinds of images and icons to drive a point home can sometimes go even further than words. Plenty of people play games, and that includes some who have limited reading ability. When words fail those players, images can more than get the job done.
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the_crimson_lure
18h agoSakurai makes some good points here, especially about using icons that make it easy to understand selections even if you don't/can't read the menu words.
But later smash games have the worst main menus imaginable. A big half-pill shaped button to the left and slightly up, with several other options of various sizes coming off it in a strange zig-zag shape, a smaller round button in the top right corner and two even smaller almost kind of half-pill shapes with diagonal edges slightly offset from each other beneath it in awkward positions.
There's barely any telling what button leads to a submenu and what button jumps into the mode until you click it. Some game modes are inexplicably put under separate submenus that don't connect to each other, seemingly arbitrarily.
Horrible UI all around that just gets more horrible with each smash game.
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