I absolutely loved the economy of the footprint.” " was simple, clean, and didn’t obstruct the beautiful combat environments. It was simple, clean, and didn’t obstruct the beautiful combat environments. “The monochromatic amber palette had a distinctive look to it that solidified the HUD as part of the game’s unique identity. “One of my favorite HUDs ever,” Candland says. David Candland, the UI design lead at Bungie, calls it out for expertly executing on some ideas that had never been attempted around the time of its launch. Valve has a history of producing lean, slick HUDs that complement the overall aesthetic of its games, and Half Life 2’s might be the top of its class. TAKEAWAY: The key takeaway from Clash Royale ’s slick design is that information should be surfaced and as readily accessible as possible, and that it’s no fun having to wait just to load one of a huge number of discrete menus. “And tab scrolling design is further complemented by instantaneous population of content in each section, eliminating ugly load times.” “Drill-downs are further reduced by populating secondary pieces of information on top of each primary scrollable section,” Om says. And it increases load times, as “more and more features are dynamically populated by communicating with servers, instead of being native.”Ĭlash Royale solves this problem with a HUD that surfaces player controls instead of tucking them several layers deep in cumbersome menus, and a snappy UI that lets plays swipe through multiple tabs instead of treating them as discrete menus. “If you look at most mid-core mobile games today, you see a generic, cloned approach to a home screen, usually a base or a lobby screen with multiple entry points to other sections of the game like battles, events, shop, social, etc.” Tandon says this approach leads to a jarring sort of friction as players move back and forth from area to area or return to the home screen, each with distinct art and backgrounds. Om Tandon, UX director at DIGIT Game Studios, praises Clash Royale for avoiding the pitfalls of so many other mobile games trying to appeal to a “mid-core” audience - players that fall somewhere between casual and hardcore. A large part of its appeal stems from taking a simple premise (adversarial tower defense, with each player defending a king and two towers and buying offensive units) and presenting in an extremely sleek and refined package.
WEB GAME UI BROWSER FULL
1) Clash Royale - Surface and scrollĬlash Royale is full of design lessons that are broadly applicable. Recognizing this, we reached out to developers who have some experience in the realm of HUD and UI design, to get some feedback about what some of the best designs in this space are, and what they do so well. The urgency with which a health indicator signals a terrible wound, or a mini-map emphasizes a quest icon, can dramatically affect how players interact with a game and what gameplay elements get priority.