0:12 What do you get when you cross Dieter Rams and Toby Fox? That’s right, it’s Good Design, Bad Design! We’re talking about the great, and just… TERRIBLE graphic design elements in games. We’re talkin’ menus, UI, UX, color choice, font choice, animation, camera work. Anything that deals with The Presentation of Information. Remember that good games can easily have elements of bad graphic design, and vice versa, so don’t get too worked up about which category your favorite game falls into. We’ve got 2 Goods and 1 Bad today, and I do like all three of these games. But one of them needs some work. Guess which one! Good design is all about the details, and if you like to fuss over the details,
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1:46 it’s a great way to learn a new skill. They teach Python, SQL, Go, and Typescript, and your account can jump to any lesson you want. Every lesson on the site is available free as a demo, and there’s a 30-day money back guarantee. Click the link and use my code DESIGNDOC to get 25% off your first year on their annual plan. Thanks to Boot.dev! Golf. The sport of …kings, no that’s horse racing. The sport of… rich jerks…and me, a normal jerk. I’ll play any golf game you put in front of me. Golf games are chill enough for a casual experience, and sweaty enough where you can really fuss over the
2:32 fine details if you want to go for that skill ceiling. It’s fun for everyone. But what if we took that chill time and injected some Mario Kart DNA in there? Super Battle Golf is golf through the lens of Peak or Repo, plus a bunch of items. Everyone on your server is playing the same hole at the same time, taking shots as fast as you can get to the ball. While you’re running around, everyone can hit you with weapons, mines, a golf cart - whatever they can scrounge up from item boxes. It’s a big scramble to get to your ball and take a shot before someone can hit you with an orbital laser. Or run you over. It’s VERY funny. Ahh. Wait a minute, this isn’t supposed to just be a review. Why is this in a good design? I’m glad you asked!
3:19 The mechanics of most golf games are pretty settled ground at this point. Taking your time, previewing your shots, setting your power and accuracy, accounting for the weather, applying spin, y’know, golf things. Some details might change here and there. Maybe once in a while a game like Ribbit King or Kirby’s Dream Course get weirder with it, but golf games play in a similar way, but not Super Battle Golf. It wouldn’t work. So, Super Battle Golf has invented a whole new graphic design object. A new UI element, custom-built for a fast-paced golf game. This guy. It’s the bar for shot power, but it also changes background colors based on where you’re aiming. The bar’s colors roughly correspond to the
4:04 terrain type the ball will land at at that power level. Light Green for the fairway, darker green for the rough, tan for the bunker, a line pattern for any out of bounds territory, and you’ll even get a pin icon if you’re close enough to the hole. They go the extra mile of matching the exact colors with the biome’s color palette which I think is nice. The bar colors itself to show a vertical slice of the terrain in the direction you’re pointing, changing colors live as you turn. It adapts for your situation and club angle selection, on the fly. It’s a very dense piece of UI, but it’s super easy to read, you’ll learn how to use it in seconds, and it streamlines your decision making to a degree that makes the focus of the whole game work a lot better than it would otherwise. Without it, you’d have to agonize much more on every shot - which would be either slower
4:53 or force you to take more of a blind guess. Super Battle Golf doesn’t have the usual overhead camera to see where exactly your shot is going. You don’t need it! Your camera’s stuck behind you, and that also makes you judge where to shoot in a more true-to-life way, rather than relying on some kinda drone footage of the course. With this power bar, I can run up to the ball, aim, and shoot in a second or two, and get pretty good results. And in a game where someone’s always about to send a land mine your way, or combining Gun with Head, you’ve gotta get to your ball and get out of the area as fast as possible. This IS kind of a racing game, after all. In fact, we don’t have to imagine what this game looks like without that bar. Mario Golf Super Rush has a similar mode called Speed Golf,
5:39 but without the terrain slice UI, you have to kick up to the overhead view all the time, in a big full-screen overlay. Your awareness of what’s going on around you goes to zero. The speed golf mode is fun enough, but it’s hard to go back to after playing Super Battle Golf. This bar is just clearly a better way to do it. Super Battle Golf's terrain slice power meter is one of those brilliant bits of design, where it’s so simple that you have to ask yourself ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’. Those ideas don’t come around that often. So this is gonna sound crazy when I say it, but I’ve had a thought lately. Everyone’s too
6:24 competent these days. … About graphic design. Finding a worthy Bad Design segment about a recent game keeps getting harder to do. Devs are using sensible fonts, tasteful color choices, decent accessibility options, solid contrast - it’s hard to find something obviously wrong with a lot of graphic design lately among these high profile games. It’s not good for content. But, the sins of the past ARE still out there. I think I’m gonna have to dig into the back catalog a little more often. So, let’s boot up my favorite TWENTY FIVE year old game - Final Fantasy X. And Spira’s favorite way to waste billions of gallons of water - Blitzball. So, before there was the Jomboy warehouse sports Blitzball,
7:10 it was this fantasy math soccer minigame. Blitzball is one of the first concepts introduced in FFX. Tidus is a Blitzball superstar, and after he gets isekai’d to the world of Spira, which just so happens to also love Blitzball, it becomes one of his only anchors in this foreign land. One of the game’s major early story arcs is building up to a huge annual Blitzball Tournament in Luca. Tidus washed up on the shores of the hometown of the biggest loser team in the entire sport, and since he’s Scottie Drippin’, he’s immediately signed up. You and your squad of lovable losers from Besaid play against a whole bunch of better teams from around Spira. For a little bit of story, and some rewards if you figure it out. And the game’s kinda fun, once you get the hang of it.
7:57 Blitzball is played on a flat plane. It’s a game of possession and zones of control. When you have the ball, you’ll control your guy, and you’ll run into other players or hit Square to get a little showdown action menu. Doing actions pits your particular stat, like Attack or Shoot, against your opponent’s stats, like Block or Endurance. You do a little math, and if your numbers are better than their numbers, you get to do the thing you wanted. If you’re inside this little halo around the ball-holder, you’re close enough to be defending them as they take actions. The more people in the halo, the more stats get added together, and the more difficult it becomes for the ball-carrier to fight through. Score some goals, and most goals wins. That’s the general rhythm of Blitzball. There’s some details I’ve glossed over, but that’s the gist of it, and it took about a minute.
8:46 The game’s explanation does not take about a minute. Blitzball has one of the worst on-boarding experiences that I’ve seen in a major minigame. Keep in mind that, although you’ve seen the game and know it’s important, you haven’t actually PLAYED it yet. Once the tournament comes around in-game, you get a full front-loaded tutorial about every mechanic, one text box after another. Seriously - up front the game’s telling you about movement, all possible actions, stats - so you can later appreciate how bad your team is, techniques - which you don’t have, how to get techniques from randos - which you can fail to do and the game will just continue, status effects you won’t see for a bit, a movement option they tell you not to use, and many more, all in a framing device where
9:35 Wakka’s teaching his own team how to play the game they play like 5 minutes before game time. Then you stop. You get dragged away with your other party members. Then you play the JRPG you bought for an hour. THEN you come back to Blitzball. And the first match is against a bunch of ringers that are pretty tough to beat when you KNOW what you’re doing, much less the first time. I know the whole thing is in a giant sphere of water but they’re REALLY throwing you into the deep end here As a story beat, this whole sequence is fantastic. But as a way to set up a minigame, it’s… hard to think of a worse way to do this. There’s a principle in design that you want a piece of information to be conveyed close to where it’ll be put into use. That works physically, like when a question mark button is right next to the
10:24 thing it talks about, but also through time. Like the opposite of what Blitzball is doing. Tell someone how to do a thing, then let them try it out right away. Don’t separate the two with a large amount of JRPG. Blitzball did everything it could to turn away all but those who were the most determined or stubborn to understand it. It’s easy to not think about a game’s camera unless something goes wrong. But the camera does a lot, even when it’s just doing its job. How the camera works is the definition of some genres, and can force subtle changes in UI. I’ve never seen a more clear case of how this works than Resident Evil Requiem.
11:11 Resident Evil games have a few distinct lineages. From the Fixed Camera angles and tank controls of classics like RE1-3, to the revolutionary over-the-shoulder view and action-heavy focus of RE4-6 and the remakes of 2 and 3. And, uh… 4 again. To the modernized first-person view, cinematic feel, and stronger horror elements of RE7 and 8. There were a lot of different directions that RE9 could go. So why not take two of them? Resident Evil Re-nine-wiem tells its story through two main characters - Newcomer Grace Ashcroft, and the return of Leon Kennedy. Each character plays like a different era. Grace’s sections feel like a mix of the classic and first-person eras, where you’re working through a claustrophobic,
11:58 zombie-infested building. Leon feels like his RE4 self. Over the shoulder cameras, and a full-on action movie happening, with a full arsenal of guns. They’re each a completely different thing, but thanks to the series’ existing hallmarks, both feel 100% like a proper Resident Evil game. Grace’s segments are all built around slow horror, building tension, and the dread of both the zombies getting up in your face, and the rationing of resources you have to do to DEAL with the zombies getting up in your face. The first-person camera adds a ton to the atmosphere. You’re not going to know what’s around that corner without putting yourself in harm’s way. You’ll have to rely on the game’s sound design more, to better anticipate threats before the threats find you. You’re not going to be able to fight off everyone,
12:44 and will have to sneak around in that first person view, which is also great for building the scares. Grace’s health and inventory systems are directly out of the earlier games, too. Her health fluctuates between a vague ‘Fine’, ‘Caution’ and ‘Danger’ status, which makes it a little more of a guess as to whether or not you can take a hit from one of these things. She has the classic slot-based inventory, starting with a limit of 8 slots, with pouch upgrades you can find along the way. It creates a much bigger emphasis on item management, especially early on. If you’re not careful, you’ll be forced to make some tough choices. It’s not the most elegant inventory, but it works well for the slower, scavenger-style of play that Grace’s segments are built around. Leon’s a superhero in comparison. Pulling the camera back to a 3rd person view makes it less
13:35 about avoiding enemies wherever possible, and more about taking them out. Leon’s got all the tools in the world to deal with these zombies, the temperament to do so, and the camera angle that better supports that style of play. The RE4-style circular health bar is much more straightforward and clear. The good ol’ attache case lets him store more weapons, more supplies, more upgrades, and lets you take some downtime to play suitcase tetris. He even gets a shop later that rewards him for killing as many zombies as possible. Leon isn’t supposed to go around the problem, he goes right through it. All these choices are borrowed from a specific era, but they all add up to support a much more aggressive playstyle. And once you get Leon to areas that Grace has already been through, the contrast between their two styles couldn’t be clearer.
14:22 Even though the camera doesn’t physically move all that much from First- to Third Person, the camera’s position determines how much information you, as a player, receive. Information is power, and your sense of power and preparedness for what lies ahead of you is a major part of what makes a game more or less scary, and that’s the name of the game in Survival Horror. The first person view is more intimate and less informative, heightening the fear, the atmosphere, and the sense of vulnerability. The Third person view is detached, gives you greater awareness, and lets you focus more on the action. Now, you CAN switch views while you’re playing. You can play Leon with Grace’s camera for example, or Grace with Leon’s. It can even be a decent accessibility option,
15:08 if you really can’t handle the intensity of Grace’s segments and want to just pull the camera back. But the game’s going for a thing here, and they’re quick to point out that the default camera settings are the intended experience. But if you like studying this kind of thing, when you play around with the setting, you can really get a feel for just how important the camera placement is to the overall impression you get. Resident Evil 9 is one of the very rare games that lets you do such a clean compare and contrast of basic technical decisions like camera placement. The way it weaves both playstyles into a single coherent experience is an amazing achievement by itself, and it’s a wonderful tool for any aspiring gamedev to see how small UI and camera changes can have a big impact.
15:55 Now the fate of the world…of graphic design…. Is in YOUR hands. Head to the comments and start gushing about your favorite game UI you’ve seen lately. We might feature it in the next Good Design, Bad Design. We’ve been getting tons of great comments on videos lately, so let’s keep that train rolling please thank you. Graphic design and communication tools in games may have gotten a lot better in the last decade, but there’s always room for improvement. *chill vibes from Super Battle Golf*
