Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

The Human-Computer Interface

Designing a good user interface is not about how beautiful and whizzy you can make your buttons. In fact, the core essence of the user experience—enabling the player to interact with the game world—doesn't need any fancy graphics or sound. The functionality that allows a player to interact with the game effectively could theoretically be implemented using simple placeholder elements. In fact, while the interface is being designed, this is the recommended approach—it's faster, and more resource-efficient.

As you may have already realized, we place more importance on the functional aspects of the user interface over the purely aesthetic aspects. Although we could argue that a perfectly functional user interface has ...