Somebody on reddit asked “How to make sure a UI appears minimalist instead of lazy?”

So I decided try to put down literally everything I know about UI design in a few short sentences.

Alignment
Make sure everything lines up with something else. Lay your UI out on a grid. If you have a large quantity of text, it has to be left or centre-aligned. Put related elements next to each other.

Heirarchy
Sort your information based on how important it is. Important stuff is big, bold and bright.

Spacing
Give your text and other elements lots of padding.

Font
Ditch novelty/sci-fi fonts and pick a good serif or sans-serif font which has a full range font weights. Use serif for huge chunks of text, or to give a more classic look. Use sans-serif for clean, modern and futuristic text. You only need one font.

Colour
Use something like paletton. Stick to as few colours as possible.

Bold choices
If some text is important, start by making it absolutely massive and dialing it back if you need to. Apply the same thinking to every other choice you make.

Movement
Use a tweening library to give every player interaction a bit of animation. Keep them short (0.25-0.5s)

Sound
Add short, subdued audio clips to every interaction. Play a random variation each time to stop them grating. Don’t use SFXR or BFXR unless you are making an 8-bit game.

I took part in Ludum Dare 37 “One Room”. I’d just recently received my oculus touch controllers, so thought I’d give VR development a whirl. I created a simple VR game based on the short story “Library of Babel” by Luis Borges.

In theory, it features 2,147,483,647 books spread out across a huge network of hexagonal rooms, although in practice I think the generation is probably off in some way. The effect works well enough for my liking though, an near-infinite library of gibberish which potentially contains works of some meaning, squirrelled away on a non-descript shelf somewhere.

Being a VR project with specialist controllers, it’s one of the first times I’ve created a game jam project with the full expectation that probably, nobody will ever play it. So I made a quick youtube trailer:

There are a couple of other library of babel projects up on itch.io, and there is a much more rigorous interpretation of the idea on the web. But adding VR does add something to it, I think. You’re able to pick books off the shelf, throw them around, and tear them in half. There is something I like about spending a few minutes trashing a room, knowing that you’ve really made no serious impact in that vast library. Also due to hardware constraints, it all gets cleared up when you leave the room anyway 🙂

I made a prototype for a neolithic revolution simulator, with city-building elements, during Ludum Dare 36 (Ancient Technology).

The Neolithic Revolution or Neolithic Demographic Transition, sometimes called the Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, allowing the ability to handle an increasingly larger population

I used Grids Pro to quickly get a hex-based map and coordinates system up and running in Unity.

Ludum Dare Entry

Back in 2014(!) I created a little dungeon-crawling/mining/city-building hybrid for Ludum Dare

After a month or so of polishing it up, I’ve released it on Google Play

This new version tightens up the economic loop and has a completely revised UI. It’s also my first stab at implementing a tutorial, which it turns out, is incredibly time-consuming!

Its also available on PC via itch.io:

I’ve also added a page for SCARP on itch.io:

I took part in another ludum dare game jam! The theme this time was “beneath the surface”. I’ve made some updates to it since the competition, so here is my latest version:

Play tokelau

I’ll hopefully have time to work on this one a little more in the coming weeks, as I had a few more ideas I wanted to try out.

I always used to find it too hard to settle on a name for any of my games, so now I just rely on Wikipedia’s random article feature. This time it gave me Tokelau, a pacific island, which inspired one of the games best features, the wave effect!

Another Ludum Dare finished! Bit too tired to get much done on this one, but there are aspects of the game (mainly the visuals) that I’m reasonably happy with.

Ludum dare page

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