From: Boss

To: Amplitude UI Team

Hey guys. As you know we are working on our new game, Humankind. Until now we’ve been doing weird shit with wizards and what not but this one is about the human civilization.

Anyway, here are some preliminary guidelines to follow if you don’t want to end up on the Stadia team.

Every UI element must be translucent or blurry. Or both. Use fades as much as possible. Contrast is a no no.

Colors: only white and blue are permitted. We want the player to stare at a white screen 95% of the time. Don’t worry we will zoom in between eras so the player remembers this is planet earth.

Text: white. Everything will be white, text too. Over a translucent background. Bonus points if you use light grey for important information.

Buttons: not translucent. I repeat, NOT translucent. But make them as small as possible. If a boomer needs several tries to click'em you are in the right path.

Icons: white, white, white. In every opportunity use an icon instead of text so the player has to mouse over it to see what it means. There are a bunch of icons btw.

No outliner. I know you are thinking that having all your cities and outpost production in a compact way at all times is a good idea but nope.

Map: make the lines really thin. The player has to be wondering where one territory starts and where it ends. Same thing for elevations. I call it the “oh, i cant go there” effect. Fog of war white of course.

Hide information as much as possible.  Example: show armies on the map with the same icon and no other information like composition or strength. Same for cities. No useful information must be a visible at a glance.

Notifications: the basic layout will be made of two parts. The top one will be a big random image and a tiny tiny button in the corner to check where that is. The bottom half will have the actual information in light blue over  blue background small text.

Society screen: color the territories based on their influence type but make it so you don’t know who phisicaly controls the it. Show some percentages. Nothing else.

Ideology axis: never, EVER show what it does unless you mouse over it. A little square kind of moves but there is a bigger box. Looks like there are separations and each one does something. Anyway, the player better memorize what each segment does if he wants to avoid carpal tunnel.

Diplomacy screen: make it fullscreen and spread everything in multiple tabs so each tab is mostly empty.

Diplomatic relations: if the player wants to know anything he has to go to our diplomacy screen. For example, if the player is at war don’t show the war score anywhere else.

That’s all for now, good luck guys.

From: Boss

To: Amplitude UI Team

Ok I think you’re a bit confused so let’s clarify some points.

If the player wants to know who is at war with who or who is allied or whatever relation is between players he has to go to the diplomatic screen and cycle between the different players.

No information on the main screen or anywhere, this is important rememember.

By the way, we’ve implemented a mechanic called Fame. Whoever has more fame at the end of the game wins. Cool. Never show other players’ fame unless you mouse over your own fame. Don’t even put a number with your position. The player must check all the time how well they are doing vs other players.

Another cool feature is you can choose different cultures that play super different. Some are militaristic, some want science, etc. The play style heavily depends on this choice. DON’T SHOW WHAT STYLE THE OTHER PLAYERS HAVE. It’s a mistery. Well not really you can always go to the diplomatic screen and see a mega transparent icon that says what playstyle they chose. If you cycle through all of them anyway.

What if they miss one of our dozens of notifications, you say. No problem, put a 5x5 pixel red icon on top of their respective player icons. There is an active demand? 5x5 pixel red icon. They are ransacking our outpost? 5x5 icon. They hate us and they are gonna murder us soon? 5x5 pixel red icon. The art team is already designing it.

Our philosophy is the player must click or mouse over multiple things and go across multiple screens for basic information.

Here is an example. There are two type of things to buy/sell, luxuries and strategic resources. Here is what I want you to do. Put two icons on screen on the top-right corner visible at all times, a romboid and a square. Then put an arrow at one side. If the player clicks the arrow show the actual resources. If not just show they icons with absolute no information of any kind. You may think it would be a good idea to at least show how many you have in total. Nope nope. The player must click as much as possible.

The war thing yeah. War is the most important event in the game, everything kinda revolves around it. You guessed it, don’t show anywhere you are at war or vs who. If there are 3 enemies trying to destroy the players little cities? Don’t  show it anywhere. Everything must look like nothing is happening, besides maybe the 5x5 pixel red icon.

Basically we want players to feel like they are trapped inside a white fog and their glasses just broke.

Meh, the start was promising, but it quickly deteriorated into low effort ramblings.

Try harder next time. Both with game and shitposting.

Sublustris wrote:

Meh, the start was promising, but it quickly deteriorated into low effort ramblings.

Try harder next time. Both with game and shitposting.

+1

Meh, I liked it.

Beyond gameplay design, UI and UX do often seem to get ignored.