Indie Game Dev: UI Study

I was talking to David Evans (of Hybrid Mind Studios) earlier today, and we were discussing how the lowest common denominator for mainstream mobile games seems to be an ever-evolving glut of functionality and features that definitely posit a challenge for a small team of developers to consider undertaking. Whether you argue if it is feature bloat or merely an evolution of the mobile space, there is no argument that gamers even in the casual space are developing a literacy for mobile games. Ignoring or poorly implementing common features that they have come to expect could translate into bad reviews or a lack of interest in your game.

On that note, I figured the best thing would be to visually compare these games, and see what I might gain from sheer observation from the developers choices of their UI and Menu design.

I took four well-known games, and one successful newcomer to the App Store: Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Jetpack Joyride, Peggle, and Tiny Wings. It is not lost on me that I chose both level-based puzzle games, and “runners”. I’m personally interested in these titles for their ability to either have continuously iterated gameplay through level design and challenges, or to keep a basic gameplay altered by the way you guide the player to interact with his or her surrounding environment.

Screenshots are provided in sections where they are applicable.

Main Menu

• In some form or another, all of these games are giving players the ability to play the game, or fiddle some knobs (options)
• A couple games use the main screen to introduce you to an immediate challenge, such as your high score or current level (Jetpack Joyride and Tiny Wings). Three of them let you jump into local or online leaderboards, pitting you against your own scores, or your friends. (Angry Birds, Peggle and Tiny Wings)
• Two games use the first screen players see as a point-of-sale (Unsurprisingly, Angry Birds and Peggle).
• Most of these games use a service other than GameCenter. This can be interpreted as an accepted inferiority of Game Center to other offerings, or just be due to the fact many of these games were available before Game Center came out, and wanted to be able to introduce Achievements and other incentives of replay-ability to players (Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Jeypack Joyride).
• Only Cut the Rope immediately introduces social media on the Main Menu, Angry Birds does if you click the bottom right icon.

Options

• Angry Birds and Jetpack Joyride don’t have specific Option screens, but their Main Menus expand a bit to offer some of the common features we see elsewhere.
• While there doesn’t really seem to be too much symmetry here, everyone seems to offer the ability to mute the audio in their game to some capacity. (I guess iOS doesn’t do this if there is an audio stream coming in from another media app.)
• Peggle offers some accessibility options, to the colorblind and lefties.

World Select

• Angry Birds and Cut the Rope have multiple sell points on this screen.
• Angry Birds invites users to gift the app, as well as purchase merchandise, sign up for a newsletter and advertises one other Angry Birds related game.
• Cut the Rope also invites users to gift the app to friends, and offers a IAP to unlock all future content without needing to beat enough levels to do it manually.

Level Select

• Angry Birds uses the Apple “page” paradigm in order to notify the user that there are pages worth of levels for this particular world.
• I included two different level selects for Peggle, since they can be somewhat different depending if you’re jumping into Quickplay or Challenge.
• All of these games mark the level icons with something to display extraneous progress on the level, past just unlocking it and beating it.

Gameplay

• With the exception of Peggle, all the games take a very minimal approach to the UI during gameplay. Most simply provide a pause button, and the score.

Pause

• Peggle’s “Pause” screen is identical to it’s “Options” screen, with the exception of having a “Main Menu” button rather than a “Credits” link.
• With the exception of Angry Birds and Peggle, the other three games are offering some sort of stats to bring the user right back into the game with something to beat. High scores, challenges, or stats.

Level End

• Angry Birds and Cut the Rope give some indication if your current score beat a previous best.
• It’s not Peggle’s “End” Screen, per se, but the fanfare leading up to the beating the level is a tremendous amount of positive feedback that is sure to make a user chuckle, or at the very least smile their first few times around, solidly awarding them for their performance.

Let me know what you think in the comments!