It’s a user experience design thing. If you have the player hold a button down rather than press it, it’s usually because you want them to be sure of what it is they want to do. A game like Hades can require some fairly precise execution and timing. I suspect the original intent was to avoid accidentally popping open the codex by pressing the wrong button while in a tense battle and wrecking the player’s sense of flow. They probably rolled it back after realizing it wasn’t that big a problem (and/or possibly getting player requests for it). If I were on the dev team, I would probably also have added an “in combat” check to make sure that there wasn’t anything dangerous nearby before allowing the codex to open.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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Humans have a finite amount of attention that they can spend on things at any given time. When it comes to incoming stimulus, we tend to break that down into [information channels] via the senses - information via what you see, hear, smell, feel, etc. The most common information channels devs use for video games are visual (sight) and aural (sound), but we will also occasionally use tactile (touch) to impart information - controller rumble and such - to convey information. Developers have to decide how the information that gets conveyed is prioritized, because we can’t always take in all of that data at once without getting overwhelmed.

When it comes to figuring out what players need to hear, background chatter/ambient conversations are generally ranked much lower on the priority scale. Usually gameplay concerns like enemies attacking, players activating their abilities, narrative details, etc. are usually much more important for a player to hear than ambient sounds like birds chirping, grass rustling, or NPCs chatting about irrelevant events in the background. Visuals follow a similar priority system - some things are more important for players to see than others, so they usually take more visual priority.

The problem comes from when you try to merge information from two separate channels together into one. We normally have some amount of information arriving visually at a time which is generally under the “visual information cap” so that it feels comfortable. If we cram too much information into one channel (e.g. we decide to cram all of the sound information in visually as well), we run the very real risk of overwhelming the player with too much sensory data. When that happens, information starts falling out - players miss stuff that they should be aware of because there’s just too much to handle at once.

This is generally why stuff like subtitles for ambient conversations usually isn’t included. There are just too many visual elements already on the screen that take priority over displaying subtitles for background chatter, like a story-relevant character suddenly deciding to say something plot-relevant to the player. It really sucks that such design constraints sacrifice the experience for players who don’t have all of those information channels available for some reason or other. Someday I really hope we can figure out a better way to convey and prioritize all that information.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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I’ve been thinking a lot about user generated content in the past year, and there’s really nothing nefarious or lazy about it. If anything, it’s more of a new set of challenges for a different kind of team than what you may have expected in the past.

Here’s the thing - AAA professionals like me usually build most of the game’s content for a large target audience. In order for us to make the most efficient use of our development resources, content designers have to build content that is aimed at the broadest spectrum of players. This generally means that we don’t have the sort of bandwidth to experiment with more creative themes or level ideas. We can’t include a kaizo-style stage in the critical path. We can’t include more than one or two kaizo stages at all, because we have to spend the majority of our time building for the major audience. But do you know who isn’t beholden to those kinds of business and production constraints? Do you know who doesn’t have to make content for everybody and can instead focus on the small niche that really enjoys that sort of stuff?

The answer to these questions is players like you. Players aren’t beholden to revenue targets, production schedules, or bug triage. Players have a lot more freedom to experiment with things than we do with the final product.

This brings me to the first core pillar of a “maker” project - the challenges for a “maker” project are different, so we need to field a different kind of team. Instead of staffing up with a lot of content and level designers to build a lot of levels, a "maker” project needs a lot more system designers, UI/UX designers, and engineers who can build the systems for the players to create the levels and content. This is a really big challenge in and of itself! Most level design tools are super duper complicated because they have to be - the designers who use those level design tools need a lot of fine tuned control in order to create extremely nuanced environments, placement of objects and AI, and so on. But players don’t have that kind of training or time to learn, and the kind of tools we have to use usually require weeks of training before people are proficient with them. This means that our main goals here are to condense all of these details into a user experience that does most of what the players will want and keep it easy and simple to pick up. User experience and user interface work is the most important thing for any user generated content element, because it’s the main factor in the percentage of players who will engage with the creation elements.

The second enormous challenge for “maker” projects is distribution. Making content isn’t very fun if nobody can find or play your work. Only a small percentage of the total player base will ever seriously engage with the creation tools; most will only ever play the game… and that’s only if they can find new things to play with. That means that the second pillar of any “maker” project is some kind of online back end system for players to upload their creations, for us to vet them for things like playability and presence of penis, and then put them up for distribution among other players who might want to play them. Players need a way to find levels or content to play. Maybe that’s through a robust search feature, keyword tagging for levels (e.g. “kaizo”, “automatic”, “traditional”, “water”, “weird”, “boot”, etc.), favorite creators (with a subscription or RSS style list for their latest uploads), player ratings for creators and content, featured content, and so on. These are not trivial issues by any means - they’re quite substantial technical challenges! We need a substantial back end to store and distribute the game data and we need a significant investment in the UI/UX of the system so that players can find the content they want out of all of the stuff that’s available. It’s an entirely different set of design and technical challenges from building an ordinary platformer.

The primary goal of the “maker” project is to create a self-contained ecosystem of players and creators that can build interesting types of content that is a little too weird or different for us to include in a mainline release. We usually also get to add additional content to the pool over time for post-launch support (as well as our own professionally-designed levels to showcase ways to use that new content). Overall the paradigm lets us get a better return on development resources in terms of player engagement by empowering the players to make the sort of content that we can’t realistically spend our resources on. It really isn’t that we ran out of ideas, it’s that we wanted to try tackling a different set of challenges and have a different team makeup to do it.

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The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

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There’s two major problems in my eyes that must be solved before mass adoption is possible. Firstly, we need to figure out how to control movement in virtual reality without making users violently motion sick. This should be obvious - nobody wants to horf as a general rule. It just isn’t pleasant. Once players can actively move about in VR, it opens up so many new content possibilities.

Secondly, we need to figure out a more convenient way of engaging with it - probably via wearable tech. Right now, VR has that immersive quality but it’s got physically problematic issues. You need a lot of clear space to move around. You can’t engage with a lot of VR from a sitting or resting position. You’re tied to the console or PC by some big heavy cables, which can be a tripping hazard. You can’t see while you’re inside, which means you could hurt somebody else or yourself.

But imagine something more like a pair of augmented glasses that can function more like an overlay on existing reality that you could control. Something wireless that isn’t heavy, something that connects wirelessly over wifi. Imagine being able to go into VR mode while you’re sitting on your couch or on the bus, and control it without needing a handheld separate controller. It might be a bluetooth device that pairs with your mobile phone, so you could personalize it for your own use. Add in some proximity technology to snap out of VR when you’re moving too close to something (or something approaches) and you have the beginnings.

Right now VR’s biggest problems are the same problem it’s always had. It’s hard to move around while inside, and it’s just clunky and difficult to interact with. It’s hard to engage with your friends in VR because of physical barriers. Lowering the barrier to entry will pave the way to mass adoption.

The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

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I can’t think of a studio or publisher that actually regretted providing mod tools, but there are studios that were bitten by their own mod tools and modding community. World of Warcraft in particular had a lot of problems over the years with supporting UI mods, across many aspects of the game.

In pvp, they had problems with their macro/scripting system allowing players to instantly destroy Shaman totems or only use casting interrupts only when opponents were actively casting. In pve, the scripting system allowed for status-cleansing effects that were auto-targeted instead of players having to pick and choose themselves. The Deadly Boss Mods era basically provided additional UI to track all sorts of elements of raid fights, forcing the encounter designers to have to build content assuming all players had those mods. Blizzard’s engineers had to rein in some of the API functionality in order to disable the core of some of these mods.

Obviously, WoW still continues to support UI mods and scripting to this day, so they obviously still support the modding community. However, it certainly hasn’t been without its growing pains along the way.

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The issue primarily stems from using a voiced protagonist. Because the player character speaks, it causes several implementation issues that can be either logistical or cognitive. These issues vary in scope, some being bigger than others. Localization and screen space, for example, are problematic. The biggest issue is probably the subvocalization element to it, however. That just doesn’t play well with a lot of players.

Here’s an example of a line from Fallout 4. If you choose “Sarcastic” as a response in one case, you get the line “I’m here to pick up an order. Two large pepperoni and a calzone. Name is ‘Fuck you’.” As you can see, it takes up a lot more screen space if you replace the ‘Sarcastic’ keyword. If you replace all of the shorthand options on screen with the full line, you’re going to overwhelm the player with too many words. Furthermore, you can also lose the clarity in purpose - the words “Tell me more” could be used in a sarcastic or affirmative way, just because of tone. This still doesn’t take into account issues with localization, like translating to other languages. Making the same line fit in the same screen space in other languages like German or Spanish can prove difficult. 

However, the biggest problem is cognitive. There’s a documented term in cognitive science called “subvocalization” - when humans read, they actually say the words to themselves in order to understand what they are reading. Researchers have actually observed tiny motions in the human larynx while subjects read silently. Thus, when we present the entire line to the player, the vast majority of them will literally say it to themselves first, and then the character on screen will immediately say the same line aloud, repeating it twice. This gets annoying very, very quickly. Have you ever had a situation where a child imitates somebody else by repeating every word said? It’s a lot like that, except it applies to the protagonist (who has the most lines out of every character in the game), so it happens constantly. It absolutely kills any humor and timing that’s dependent on delivery. We’ve tested it out. It was not well received.

I will admit that games have had problems with paraphrasing not matching the actual intent of the line. It’s a bug, and those happen. It is a major problem for some of the fans, and I know Bioware has recognized it. However, the paraphrasing deals a lot better with localization and the subvocalization problem. There might be a better way overall to represent dialogue options in game that we haven’t thought of yet, but showing the entire line is not it. Really.

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I think somebody has an axe to grind against microtransactions and is looking for some validation. Here’s the image in question:

So first off, the meme is disingenuous in its message. The meme-maker never actually purchased anything; this is a screenshot of the UI from a Free to Play mobile game called “Asphalt 8″, by Gameloft. It’s currently available at the App store and via Google Play. We’ve already established that in-app purchases are probably going to be there because (as we have firmly established in the past) money has to be made somewhere and the game is free. But let’s break the meme down a bit further.

The purpose of the game is to race cars on tracks to earn currency with which to buy more cars and tracks. One can spend real dollars to purchase more cars and/or tracks. That is really no different than Gran Turismo, Forza, Mario Kart, or really any other racing style game that offers paid DLC. As a racing game, a lot of the UI is going to be dedicated to displaying information about your cars, your tracks, and your statistics. Here is Asphalt 8′s:

The sections in red are, of course, things that lead to in-app purchases or managing in-game currency. This is where they offer you new tracks and featured cars. The sections in green are buttons to immediately race. The meme tried to downplay the one in the lower left, but it’s there. Finally, all of the sections in blue are dedicated to showing you pertinent information, not selling in-app purchases or handling in-game currency. These show things like options, leaderboards, what cars you own and their stats, and so on.

Let’s compare this to the UI for a AAA racing game like Gran Turismo 5:

Using the same breakdown, we’ve got the blue still representing player info, the red representing options to spend game currency, and the green to actually start the game. The overall menu favors the ‘immediately play’ much more, but the overall is not that far removed from Asphalt 8. This isn’t so different from other games that feature a similar emphasis on statistics, play, and the spending of currency:

As I said, the meme itself is disingenuous. It’s conflating any element that isn’t “start game” with “GIVE US YOUR MONEY”, and that’s unfair. If you look at AAA games, they certainly have some elements of it but I don’t think it’s as oppressive as the meme makes it out to be. Heck, even Doom II only had two out of five choices in the main menu to immediately start playing - New Game and Load Game. 60% of that menu doesn’t lead to gameplay!

In all seriousness, if you don’t like microtransactions or in-app purchases you’ll probably want to avoid certain genres of games that have wholly embraced them as a business model. Sports, racing, MMOs, or any game with a heavy “collectible” emphasis will probably feature them, because they want to make it easy for players who want to buy things to be able to do so. But I don’t really think that the meme maker has a point other than “I really don’t like microtransactions”. I understand not liking something and do sympathize, but there are a lot of people out there who are voting with their wallets. In-app purchases and microtransactions are here to stay.

The extent of design work done by a UI programmer would typically be how the data is parsed, stored, and displayed. The UI programmer usually does not do the layout or the visual design of the UI.

The overall look and feel is usually handled by a senior UI artist or a concept artist under careful direction from the art director on the project. The individual screens/pages/options/etc. are then done by UI artists (under approval of their lead and the art director, naturally).