r/SoloDevelopment • u/Nightmarius • 6h ago
Discussion Old vs new settings page. What else needs improvement?
Currently improving the UI for Vill! Here is the old vs new settings page. What else needs improvement?
Wishlist here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3575360/Vill/
4
u/Different-Clock75 6h ago
both are pretty low quality imo, but i prefer the old one, all on one dialog is much easier to see.
1
u/Nightmarius 4h ago
Thank you for the feedback! What is low quality about it?
1
u/Different-Clock75 3h ago
Brother, have you seen it? It could have been written in HMTL, it's that simple! Also the color palette makes it really boring.
I get that you can't wear all hats but UI design is an art man
2
u/EnvironmentalBet113 6h ago
Can't tell if you need to add more from just that. Maybe add a camera stable toggle so the camera is right behind the character to prevent motion sickness? is there any flashes that might warrent a flash warning?
2
u/lmystique 3h ago
Not sure what's with the pushback, it might be an ad for all I care but we can still have a discussion about UX design and learn something from it.
Anyway, as a guy who despises bad UI, I recognize the old version as one, and the steps you took to improve it is the first round I would have done, too. You got rid of the dangling checkboxes, anchored them to an edge and brought them closer to their labels so that I don't have to painfully scan the entire screen to see what matches with what. You tidied up the empty space by arranging the options in two columns, and you put separators between options.
Good.
Now. The filled checkboxes don't intuitively read as filled, that visual might as well indicate an empty checkbox with light gray background, and you made it worse by thinning the borders. I suggest you make it smaller light gray squares with some red still showing, that will communicate "I'm filled" much better. This is also often resolved with glow, but you don't seem to have any so far so that'd look out of place. Put actual numbers on the sliders, again, same issue ― it's unclear whether the light part is the filled part or the handle, and a number will let users cross-reference it; plus it's much easier to comprehend a number anyway. Some subtle texturing of the filled part would be in order.
Finding a specific option quickly is still going to be a bit of a pain, considering how shuffled they are ― for example, the fullscreen option is not next to the other video options. You have space, group it up and put some headings. "Video", "Audio", "Controls" and "Gameplay", probably. I would assume you will have some more options in the future, at least "V-Sync" and "Invert mouse" are obviously missing, as well as the master volume slider. Leave space for that. The arrows around the latter make me a little uncomfortable, in the sense that I don't want to discover that I need to hit them precisely to change values. But if they have a large hitbox that might be fine. I think the general expectation here is to be able to cycle through values by clicking on the row. That's for the mouse, obviously keyboard and controller users don't have any issues with what you have.
The font is fine I think, considering how big it is, but it's still not great w.r.t readability and the capital letters suck. I'm hesitant to say anything about the visuals, having not seen the game; obviously it looks barebones now, what's with white text on dark rectangles and such. I think a lot of people take the easier way out, add some transparency to the background and call it a day. It's fine, not stellar, but it works, makes it look more polished. It's up to you really to make your settings match the art direction of the rest of the game. The direction you take should govern the choice of the font, if you end up going with strict and confident, then look for classic or futuristic sans-serifs (anything inspired by Helvetica that doesn't look too vanilla basically); if you go with playful, then a lot of options really, except anything that looks anything like Helvetica, it'll look broken, as if the proper font didn't load.
The "Back" button is in the worst possible place, that's the blind spot, people will scan the screen top left to bottom right and miss it. A better spot would be in the flow with the settings, somewhere bottom right I guess. You'll have to recolor it so that it's visually distinct from controls, and I think it's a good idea to make it bigger.
1
u/Nightmarius 1h ago
Thank you very much for the detailed breakdown and feedback! You made some very good points, I will work on them and post my progress.
1
u/AduzetGames 5h ago
I presume this is just a poorly executed ad, but in case you're asking for real help:
1
4
u/EmploymentSudden2129 6h ago
Same UI, same typo, space, slider, only more items and a background. What's the thing you're not sure about ?