factorio interface design (including mainmenu)

[mperrdev]

For the suggested research tree, FIRST LINK!

Right now, factorio's interface is easily for me the weakest part of the game by a significant portion. Even the controls are pretty good in comparison and I still haven't really gotten the hang of those entirely yet despite a full controls screen. At the moment I'm about 40 hours of playtime, with 40 or so hours where my computer was idling in the game (just in menu)

THE GOOD INTERFACE TEST:
1. Put bag over a random person's head, off the street.
2. Start up game
3. Remove bag, yell at them the following directions.
3. Tell them to change a list of random options you give them.
4. Tell them to start the game, load a different game up.
5. Exit the game quickly.

If they look confused, act confused, or get stuck in any way, or navigate down the wrong menu or anything, then your menu system could be better.

All jokes aside

Your menu system should allow a player who is completely confused on how they started up the game to know exactly where in the menu they are, where the things they are looking for are, how to get to them, and how to get back to where they were previously. That is just UI and UX in general, that is the idea.

JARRING = The effect someone gets when they are overwhelmed visually, or by the design of the interface, or even from audio (BABA YETU LEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY)
CLICKS = how many clicks until you reach a certain item
GOAL = Minimize how jarring the menu is, without making the menu so nested that it takes 40 clicks to reach something. RIGHT NOW: its jarring AND takes too many clicks.

Starting in order of when the player sees them:

MAIN MENU:
1. Push it off to the left side, your artist worked very hard on that centerpiece factory, and this is why games do that.
2. About should always be at the bottom, it just shows you the version and so few games have "about" that people generally look at the bottom and get confused when they don't find it.
3. "FACTORIO" should be fucking huge, it should be an exclamation on the screen, its orgasmic light should enter your eyes through your monitor and force you to hit play.
4. Why does it say "Main menu" above the main menu, is that confusing? Get rid of it so when you replace the menu art you can space out the buttons vertically and improve the look of the entire menu system more easily.
5. You should NEVER get rid of the previous menu buttons from hitting a single button. When you hit PLAY or any other button that has a sub menu like this, it should just pop out to the side elegantly. REASON: less clicks, less jarring = GOAL

THE MENU TREE I AM SUGGESTING << HEREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE NOTE: ignore the other details unless you like that stuff
https://puu.sh/svGjx/ee52f79374.png

to illlustrate what I think is a better LOOKING interface, have a look at the research screen:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =807172346 just a screenshot I took of the research screen.

Now, this game's art is very "oldschool grunge," its made to look dirty. The early fallout games used this art style as well, here is their interface:

fallout 1&2 (2 uses the same): http://newfallout.com/images/fallout-1/ ... -guide.jpg
fallout tactics: http://i35.tinypic.com/euh85f.jpg

Another game that reminds me of factorio's art syle: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zYFDQBmb-V8/hqdefault.jpg <- motherlode

As you can see, all of it is very grungy, old school, rusty, dirty art.
In my opinion, fallout tactics is the best use of this art style, as fallout 1 and 2 go a bit too far to be artsy, and just end up with a lot of wasted space.

This game would benefit greatly from hiring a freelance ui artist (there are MANY MANY of them who are very skilled at what they do) there is no reason to hire the person full time as working on an interface like this takes about 3 months to about 8 I would guess if the person was a bit slower than most.

Bringing the interface "back" to date would help a lot and after they sort out a LOT of the UI design problems they should definitely look into this, as I hope they know already that the interface is quite strange looking.


But yeah, that's a lot of words and stuff, hope it helps when it comes to redesigning the menus and interface to become a bit more professional and designy.

EDIT: Oh, and I don't mean to say that they should be doing UI art right now, that is absolutely dumb. It's more of a suggestion as to what is appropriate later on in the game's life. After you allow the programmers and a designer design the menus is when you start looking into making it pretty of course.

[mperrdev]

I'll probably rewrite this later, with the formatting of all this it kinda reminds me of the design notes I use in my own projects on notebook paper. Must've been completely distracted or something.

Not the worst, just hard on the eyes at a glance.

Will rewrite in the morning. and have a better looking graph and more clear notes.
Sorry to anyone who looked at this and screamed "NOPE" hahahahaha.

BTW: You can fucking DRAG the main menu, what the..... WHAT? LOL. I love alpha/beta development, don't-care city is PERFECT to work from for UX design, much better to fix something completely absurd than figure out what is absurd and THEN fix it.

[ssilk]

Ok, then please make a new thread. I will close this one now.

And please use the IMG tags for the pics, or better upload the pics and use it inline, cause such suggestions can take a long time until it is implemented and the images can be deleted when it comes to implementation.

Sorry, but that is just in your interest as suggestion-maker.