I think I might start this as a little daily column, ooh-err.
Anyway. Elsewhere on the interwebs, I got talking to someone about the relative interfaces in games; me thinking about DeathSpank's interface (both keyboard and gamepad) and my friend telling me about Skyrim.
The thing that I got from the discussion is that PC games don't actually care as much about the user. They figure the user has a lot of buttons in front of them, they can press them to bring things up. My example, actually, is DeathSpank. There's a quest log, inventory, 'hero cards' and equipment. Each of those can be brought up from a single keypress. BUT, if you're using a gamepad, there's only a single button allocated to equipment and you step through the pages from there.
Now, my friend mentioned that there's a 'console accommodation' in Skyrim, pressing a single keyboard button brings up a 4-point menu for levelling/skills, map, items and magic. Similar to the four items in DS, really.
My friend stated that he'd use the one button quick key for doing this - but the thing is, I'm not convinced that's the right thing to do, on the game dev's POV at least.
If you use something frequently, leave it a single (easy) keypress away. But if you don't, don't make it a first-class item parallel to everything else, instead delegate down to a menu. In DS, I don't often have to touch any of those 4 pages, so it makes sense that they're one level removed.
Skyrim seems a bit different, where at least one of those pages is frequently accessed, but even then I can't shake the feeling that there's something wrong.
It's as though you're given a dashboard of 15-20 options, that are all as 'important' as each other, seeing how they all take the same effort to make happen, yet surely you don't need all 15-20 options available all the time? Wouldn't it be better to hive off the less important options into a submenu?
And this is what we're seeing being done on console games; they don't have ~100 buttons at pressing distance. Because of this, I'm thinking they have to intentionally be careful with what does what, and force the design to fit - and I'm thinking this is not a bad thing.
I also think a lot of software developers could learn from this approach, actually. Instead of designing to fit with x facilities, what would happen if only a subset y were available?
The other thought I'm having out of all of this is how far I personally have travelled. I always used to be the person who consistently said that I never made it look good, merely that I made it work well, but the more I journey as it were, the more I find that the two things are practically one and the same. I still don't make it look good, but I make it work well for the user, I think.
Thoughts?
Anyway. Elsewhere on the interwebs, I got talking to someone about the relative interfaces in games; me thinking about DeathSpank's interface (both keyboard and gamepad) and my friend telling me about Skyrim.
The thing that I got from the discussion is that PC games don't actually care as much about the user. They figure the user has a lot of buttons in front of them, they can press them to bring things up. My example, actually, is DeathSpank. There's a quest log, inventory, 'hero cards' and equipment. Each of those can be brought up from a single keypress. BUT, if you're using a gamepad, there's only a single button allocated to equipment and you step through the pages from there.
Now, my friend mentioned that there's a 'console accommodation' in Skyrim, pressing a single keyboard button brings up a 4-point menu for levelling/skills, map, items and magic. Similar to the four items in DS, really.
My friend stated that he'd use the one button quick key for doing this - but the thing is, I'm not convinced that's the right thing to do, on the game dev's POV at least.
If you use something frequently, leave it a single (easy) keypress away. But if you don't, don't make it a first-class item parallel to everything else, instead delegate down to a menu. In DS, I don't often have to touch any of those 4 pages, so it makes sense that they're one level removed.
Skyrim seems a bit different, where at least one of those pages is frequently accessed, but even then I can't shake the feeling that there's something wrong.
It's as though you're given a dashboard of 15-20 options, that are all as 'important' as each other, seeing how they all take the same effort to make happen, yet surely you don't need all 15-20 options available all the time? Wouldn't it be better to hive off the less important options into a submenu?
And this is what we're seeing being done on console games; they don't have ~100 buttons at pressing distance. Because of this, I'm thinking they have to intentionally be careful with what does what, and force the design to fit - and I'm thinking this is not a bad thing.
I also think a lot of software developers could learn from this approach, actually. Instead of designing to fit with x facilities, what would happen if only a subset y were available?
The other thought I'm having out of all of this is how far I personally have travelled. I always used to be the person who consistently said that I never made it look good, merely that I made it work well, but the more I journey as it were, the more I find that the two things are practically one and the same. I still don't make it look good, but I make it work well for the user, I think.
Thoughts?