Building games that can be understood at a glance

And sorry, I'm not sharing details about the sale, but I'm quite sure the new owner was able to turn quite a profit. He built an entire company around Loop, making around 10 new games.

He describes it as "criticism," but doesn't convince me there's a way to make the interface better. In fact, I'd go the opposite direction and suggest that hearthstone is too simple a game in the name of simplicity.

Having the own health only in the top bar on battle screens seems wrong: the enemies have it fully displayed, and in battle health development is obviously especially important to see, so the bar-representation makes sense.

Removing it from the top bar just on battle screens doesn't seem to make that much sense either (do you pop it back in when a full-screen menu appears during battle, which covers the player character? redesign those screens to be more cluttered, just so the bar on the character is visible?)

One can argue about the importance of the status icons. For some of them I'd prefer it if they (or rather, their effects) were more noticeable, others are not that important most of the time. On the other hand, them being were they are the important facts are displayed fairly compact and leaving lots of room for the really nice graphics - I'd disagree that the overall screen is cluttered.

So for instance consider crafting in Diablo 2 vs Diablo 3. In Diablo 2 crafting was ostensibly horrible. There was no clear way displayed of how to do it, or what the result might be, and actually putting things in your cube was tedious at best. Diablo 3 refined this. And suddenly all relevant information was immediately displayed, items would be automatically taken from your inventory and the entire system was substantially cleaned up.

In a vacuum it's obvious which would be preferable. But somehow in game, the clean crafting system felt boring and tedious whereas the 'dated' crafting system, which really did feel like an anachronism, somehow managed to avoid this in ways that are really difficult to pin down. Those unnecessary obstacles often defy description yet are really what create the 'feel' of a game.

Gameplay and presentation are both intrinsically tied together and I think trying to formulate a cookie cutter definition of good versus bad is something that's unlikely to be productive.

Take something like Civilisation. You don't need hours of tutorial to play the game. As the game progresses, it becomes more and more complex, but you start with 2 units, no enemies and no technology. After you build a city, technology is introduced. As you start exploring, enemies are introduced.

If civilisation threw new players into a typical midge scenario, players would need to read manuals and use tutorials and spend quite some time getting an overview of the current state.

Even complex games can start with the player playing a game.

It is frustrating when something that was on the grognard end of things gets juniorized; I've seen a lot of complaints in that vein about the last Paradox Hearts of Iron iteration.

If you play some Ludum Dare games, you'll see how important a good UI is to pick up a new game. You'll see lots of unexplained controls, unexplained mechanics, and indecipherable labels. And these little details will make or break games.

You don't have to like them. Not every customer wants to dedicate whole life to games.

I am thankful to mobile games creators that they did not rejected my demographics and interest group and started to make games that I can enjoy.

getting over it is extremely minimalistic, immediately accessible and exceedingly difficult

stellaris has a lot of layers, with the ux segmenting the game minigames for the user, but the core game loop is quite straightforward and the complexity mostly cosmetic.

triple town has both a simple interface and simple game rules, but complexity grows exponentially with the combination level, 2048 is more of the same.

there's no direct relation between interface complexity and game complexity; there's no even direct relation between rules complexity and game complexity.