Game Dev Blog #6: UI Revisited

UI reviseted

For this post I am going to go over icons for Napkin Western (working title) which is a mobile game I am working on, and will discuss the original icons which I posted in Blog #3 as well as the new revamped icons that you will see later on in this post.

     1: Original Icons: Why they don't work and what they get right.

     It's easy to look at these icons and say "those aren't very good". But, rendering aside, why  aren't they good? When one looks at these images it becomes apparent: they are all very static. Even the Rapid Fire ability (pictured bottom-left), which is a picture of bullets flying in the air, is very still and boring.

     It may be harder to say what is right in these, so  I'll go over that in more detail.
Firstly, these are abilities for a game, specifically a Mobile Game (a game designed for smartphones and tablets). So these icons will be seen on a fairly small scale. With this in mind, the icons are all easily distinguishable by a readily apparent motif: colour. By colour coding the icons, it becomes easier for the player to know what ability they are going to use without having to read test or even identify and icon: Yellow does damage, Green hinders, Blue helps. Simple as that.


     2: New Icons: Better Art is Better.

     So here we have the new icons. Obviously the art is of a higher quality now, but all of these new icons are much more active. There's movement in pretty much all of them and they convey action much more than their predecessors. Cropping on most of these helps to reinforce a sense of motion, as well as active lines on diagonals and in circular patterns. The icons reinforce the colour coding aspect and are readable at a distance/small size.
     Rendering does not need to be top notch, because you aren't going to see it at the intended viewing size. Only the bigger details are given attention, as anything to small will not be seen when the icon is scaled down. 
    I tried to keep a consistent style from icon to icon and for the most part I do feel like I've succeeded.


     Hopefully these ramblings were helpful to someone, more content in posts to follow!