IronManBeta
Posts: 4132
Joined: 2/25/2002
From: Burlington, Ontario
Status: offline
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[QUOTE=Von Rom]I agree with many of the comments here:
In the end, the game should be fun to play. The game mechanics and interface should aid in that enjoyment. The graphics should be easy on the eyes, and from a glance, should convey their intended function.
Cheers![/QUOTE]
Every game should have a superb user interface of course, but beauty is often in the eye of the beholder. People all react differently, and often without much consideration. Most kludgy interfaces get that way because they are trying to satisfy too many different stakeholders in the design process, many of whom give scant thought at all to the UI.
I write software in my day job and I have frequently fought to establish the quality of the user interface as a high priority. It is fiendishly hard to do well though! Just because something sounds like a good idea to the programmer doesn't mean anyone else will like it. There is a fairly humiliating process to be gone through before the ultimate user interface emerges. How well I know that it is easy to produce a hard-to-use interface, and very hard to produce an easy-to-use one. Like you, I wish more people paid attention to it!
Your point about customizing the interface to a degree by remapping keystrokes is a good one. If you can't have one perfect UI for everyone, at least let them individualize it a bit in a way that is more to their liking. Food for thought for game designers everywhere....
Cheers, Rob.
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