Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

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Man, I was literally at their booth in GDC 25 minutes ago.

Truthfully the program they have looks fantastic at empowering UI/UX designers to do more with games.

I'm not sure if everyone is aware, but the normal flow is that a UI/UX designer will spend days in Figma; give the output to a programmer and the programmer will (often) say that it's impossible to implement for X,Y reason.

What follows is a back and forth between the programmer and the designer until eventually a design exists that can be implemented.

This is compounded by the fact that there's no good UI framework in Unreal engine, at least not for AAA games.

So, while I have not done a feasibility test yet, the workflow of this tool is definitely the best I've seen and seems to integrate seamlessly with Unreal Engine and blueprints.

I'm personally really excited, because with this it's possible for a UI/UX designer to work without the aid of a programmer.

(also, game programmers tend to hate doing UI).

i've often thought that if i were a UI/UX designer, i would want to work in games. most productivity software already has deep-rooted paradigms and abstractions, and attempting to challenge any of these results in grumbling users. in video games, however, a novel UI/UX decision is usually met with curiosity rather than irritation. presumably this can be ascribed to the user's frame of mind when they sit down to do work versus play a game.

This would depend, I reckon, on whether ones emphasis was on user experience or user interaction.

Games are great for user experience, because gamers are, by definition, looking for an experience. They aren't there to get work done, they want to have fun. So a fun interaction paradigm, with creative visuals, sound effects, various game-related skeuomorphisms: all of that is what they want.

User interaction, on the other hand, is about keeping the software from standing between the user and what the user wants to do. A large part of this job is insisting that developers don't do surprising things, but rather, stay within the lanes of expected interactions for the platform. There's room for creativity and novelty, but the budget for those must be spent carefully.

Agree that design<->programming handoff is tedious but curious where you think UMG is lacking. I’ve found it pretty fun to implement UI in once I got the hang of it.

It's unfortunate that Unreal Engine is so bad at UI/UX these days. I was playing UT99 with some friends the other day and was struck by just how powerful, intuitive, and flexible it's UI/UX was, both in-game and through all the configuration/server browser/etc. menus. It's one of the first times I've really like like an old man yelling about how the modern equivalent of things is so awful.

It's certainly not worse at authoring smooth UIs, it's just not aaaaalll that much better. While UMG-- UE's 2D toolkit-- has lagged other parts of UE by a lot, it's still way easier to get precise visual results for your UI than in most native UI toolkits, even if it's less mature than, say, CSS. That said, given how elegantly things like 3d collisions are handled in UE, it's pretty ridiculous that you can't have, say, convex hit boxes for buttons in UMG.

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