Good Design, Bad Design Vol. 12 - Video Game Graphic Design at its Best and Worst
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- Опубликовано: 15 сен 2024
- Go listen to The Magnus Archives over at www.rustyquill.com or find it in your podcast app of choice. Thanks to them for sponsoring this episode!
We’ve got video games and we’ve got graphic design in Good Design, Bad Design Vol. 12. Let’s talk about diegetic and non-diegetic level select menus, weird typographic choices, syncing animation, sound effects, and music, and little layout errors that add up to bigger problems.
Featuring:
Super Mario 3D World: Bowser’s Fury
Vexx
Opus Magnum
The Witcher 1
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Design Doc on Twitter: / warbot400
#witcher #bowsersfury #graphicdesign
MAGNUS ARCHIVES GET UNSETTLED www.rustyquill.com/
#notacult
Totally a cult
Would you please add names to the footages you are showing in ur videos?
Thank you so much for recommendation actually! I haven't heard about this podcast and I wanted something similar to scp stories, that I listen to on the Exploring Series channel.
@@NASTIX24 The Magnus Archives is fantastic, get in there!
oh hells yeah, great series!
Don’t forget in bowser furry when you finish a section if you walk away a little bit and turn the camera away the level will change when you look back. Making it even more seamless.
I would have personally preferred if I could do the different missions in any order I want, or all at once. Having to leave and come back for every one makes cleaning up the levels a bit more of a chore, but I do appreciate that a lot of things like enemy placements change along with the objective, that couldn't be done if you put all the missions into one.
@@GL_099 in my opinion the changing stages are cool as fuck
Fury, not furry. Important distinction.
@@suakeli Bowser's Fury is def a furry game
Lol nice joke
“i think the witcher could use a bit more polish”
“i thought it *was* polish”
Eyyyyy!
I can't believe my brain let me hear that as i was reading
I farded
I love how you managed to respectfully roast the hell out of Vexx's font choices.
Since you're talking about UI-less games, I was wondering if you could do a video on games that succeed or fail at going UI-less.
Agreed! This would be very interesting.
Yes. This would be very interesting. More broadly, it would be interesting to look at games which succeed (or fail) at removing something prominent from the UI. Removing the HUD is one example, but I immediately thought about Hyper Light Drifter. It has a HUD, but none of the interface (or anything in the game beyond the brief tutorial) has any words. In both cases, a significant channel of information is removed from the UI, requiring more to be presented by the environment. Without words, the HUD and inventory screen are forced to be fairly minimal (and well organized), but even still, their contents need to be explained indirectly by interactions with the environment, resulting in similar design decisions to something you might see in a HUDless game.
I think it's more difficult to pin down how a game manages to work when prominent elements are removed than when they're added, so a whole episode specifically on the design choices resulting from omissions would be very interesting.
To be fair though, part of me really just wants to see more about Hyper Light Drifter. There's a ton of interesting design choices in that game.
Games that fail at no UI: GTA and RDR, cuz you're constantly paying attention to the tiny little corner of your screen where the minimap is.
@@Vesperitis Firewatch did a great job overcoming that exact issue by the way the map was integrated into the gameplay. They flipped it around into mechanic that supports the immersion really well. It essentially puts you in the exact same circumstances as the character and makes you do exactly what you really would do in the situation (identify landmarks, etc). As a mechanic, it also did a lot to support the efficacy of the environmental design/art by forcing you to pay attention to it.
It's definitely not a universal solution though. It worked there because it complemented the premise of the game. It also puts requirements on the level design to make it work out.
"Shadow the Hedgedge"
My sides
.
*OW*
ᵀᴴᴱ EDGE
Shadow the edge-hog
@@12345678abracadabra Edgy the hedgy
You outdid yourself with your 'bad design' transition this time.
I audibly recoiled from it.
May I just mention how well-designed your "Bad Design" titles are for invoking that visceral, quintessential feeling of bad design? They're always so good, at being bad.
It's the most fun part. Sometimes we make things that are way too bad and have to tone it down a smidge.
Making something bad on purpose is an art in itself.
I think all Witcher games are polish equally. They all made in Poland after all.
Cyberpunk cries
Polish sausage
Love me a good pun
Noice!
@@Benji-Lindz I don't want to sound like a jerk, but you do realize the original comment is a pun, right?
9:18 Outer Wilds handles the real-time foreign language translation really well, in my opinion. The main objective of the game is to translate ancient murals to progress the game, so you end up using the translation tool constantly. All it really does is display a jumble of letters and symbols that quickly transition into the full paragraph, it takes less than a second but it still feels like the tool actually scans the hieroglyphs and real-time translates them. The tool itself is diegetic and your characters holds an old-fashioned narrow screen in their hands. By far one of the most creative "text boxes" I've seen in a game.
I did not remember the witcher 1 UI being that busy,In my head was a lot more simple with a lot of brown and less collor I dont know why.
It was either Witcher 1 or 2 that had a separate UI for keyboard and controller. Either way, they were all pretty crap.
The UI was created for lower resolution monitors; It looks crowded on higher resolutions because of bad upscaling
I think the second set of UI problems on The Witcher 1 might be tied to bad UI scaling? After all, the game is pretty old and almost surely designed for something like 480p and the size suffers on the upscaling.
Also, speking of fonts, loop Hero does a fantastic job with it's fonts. While the fancy font is the default, which is not bad, but can be hard to read if you can't see well, or are watching a video on the game on a lower than HD resolution, so the main menu displeys on the upper corner pretty prominently the fact you can change it to either a version with more resolution and no serifs, or to a dyslexic friendly font, which are a bit less cohesive with the aesthetic, but still look fine and more importantly, are much more readable then the default. It is a fantastic choice that seems simple or even borderline meaningless but actually does a lot of heavy lifting for the game
I was thinking that about Witcher 1 as well. Those tiny icons probably look fine on a lower-res monitor but in the days of standard 1080 and a chunk of 1440 and 4k, they do scale well.
Isn't Witcher 1 a PC exclusive? Most PC gamers would have had a 1280x1024 monitor back then; 1080p is barely any taller than that, so the only issue is getting it to fill out the extra space in the widescreen format.
@@stevethepocket At the time the standard good monitor was 720p, while most PC gamers still played at 480p 4:3 monitors, because more than that was pretty expensive to buy and they had all very low durability.
Loop Hero did right what Blasphemous did REALLY wrong. Can't thanks the devs enough for that decision.
@@TheMetalOverlord Bro, what country do you live in? I have never once in my life seen a 1280x720 monitor-and hell no, 640x480 was ancient history by 2007. My monitor at the time was a CRT I got from a thrift store three years earlier and it was still big enough to do 1024x768.
I can see pretty well but because so many video games use such tINY FONTS AND MENUS I had to get glasses to keep playing games :’)
Seriously, for me the first game with subtitles that are easy on the eyes was AC: Valhalla - big ass font with antialiasing. Design Doc coul make a whole 30 minute video listing games that failed when it comes to text on the screen
This was me with God of War (2018). There was a patch to allow bigger font but it was still super tiny. And they had so much room to make it just a bit bigger. Why Kratos?? Why???
@@bretdorman3433 I really don’t get it. If I ever do end up following my dreams of making my own games, I’m definitely gonna make sure you can at least Read the dang text
@@bretdorman3433 not only it was tiny bu also blended with the background. Whenever they started talking on the boat I tried to find an angle so the text would be on a dark background. To no avail...
I missed a lot of key information in Doom Eternal because I couldn't squint hard enough.
Age of Calamity's menu is... Less than ideal in the late and post-game...
But it's appropriately thematic and can be traversed vs the witcher 1 weird uniqueness
I'm not nearly done and I expected as much ^^
Wdym?
Wym? It's clear to see quests that are completed, not completed, or one's you have the materials for.
Never thought I'd see magnus sponsoring youtube videos
I was like "oh no not Magnus Archives being called out"
The relief it was an ad 😅
i have a nitpick with Vexxs title screen. It really bothers me how the title "Vexx" is one stile and the "press start" is in another, it really feels jarring to me.
If you're gonna talk about display fonts, you can't just ignore Omikron: The Nomad Soul
You know what, you're totally right.
Also if you're talking about uncanny facial animations. Those weirded me out even after 12 hours of playing the game.
I did _not_ expect a magnus pod sponsor here. What a lovely surprise!
THE CLOCK STRIKES 12:00
but its 8 AM
It’s 12 somewhere
16:36 - First witcher UI is tiny for you due to absence of scaling and resolution creep over the last years. On monitors and resolutions, that were available when game came out, it was competely fine. So its more of a tech issue, not the intentional design.
Also imo radar being small is not an issue, cause its main function is to show you enemies around you (imitating general awareness of hero), not to help you navigate through world. For latter you have a map.
Man, I managed to be lost nearly the entire time in bowsers fury
I loved it though, one of my favourite Mario adventures in a while
I can't even begin to tell you how much I love your videos. I've been working as a graphic designer for a handful of years now and I'm almost done with my BFA in graphic design and I still always learn something new and wonderful from your videos. Simply amazing. :)
For typography, the thing that drives me absolutely nuts in gaming is when dialog text appears letter by letter instead of having all dialog text appear at once. You can usually change the speed of this, and just turn it to instant, but not always.
I don't know what the aim of this is for. But it puts a hard cap on the speed you can read the text at, and puts motion on the screen which will naturally draw your focus away from the text you are reading.
Often times, a game will be set up so you can make the text appear instantly by just pressing a button again. Although I've occasionally run into an issue of text appearing surprisingly fast, and I'll advance dialog by mistake before having a chance to read.
It's not the biggest deal in the world, but it's incredibly widespread.
Also, Tales of Symphonia deserves a special mention for making the text speed menu backwards. 0 is instant, 1 is fastest, 7 is slowest. I think some other Tales games may have also done this... but I don't remember entirely.
I assume the idea is to emulate someone talking, as words tend to come out of our mouths letter by letter as well in a fashion. I can see how it can be annoying, but I’ve never had a problem with it myself.
I certainly wouldn’t say no to an option to increase the speed / make it instant though.
@@PlasmaSnow12 In Ace Attorney games they make it quick AND vary the speed a bit. Gives it lots of personality.
I remember seeing your first installment of this series when it first came out and was really inspired by it. Awesome to see you still killing it on Vol. 12!
I’d love to hear you talk about Killer7’s design, it’s utterly bizarre on purpose but sorta grows on you
DS games and 3DS games, at least many that I played, had really good UI's. All of the important information ends up on the screen where the most of the gameplay happens, while the rest was put on the other screen. This was a massive benefit for tactics games like Advance Wars and Fire Emblem where all the stats of the unit could be displayed without obscuring the map. It also meant players could watch more of the game world. Given that some 3DS titles did have pretty open levels on a tiny screen, that's a big deal. I'm thinking of Ever Oasis and Code Name: S.T.E.A.M., probably Monster Hunter too. Kid Icarus is also one of those titles and it has a LOT happening on that tiny screen. Screen real estate is precious on handhelds.
That sponsor sounds pretty cool actually, I-
it's great! highly recommend
why is a side-game packed in with a rerelease of 3d world one of the unironically best Mario games ever made?
Because Nintendo
Fire Emblem Three Houses' typeface works well with the theme of the game, but the font size is just a tad too tiny. Whenever I go back to play it, me and my nearsighted glasses-wearing eyes always have to adjust to how small it is, regardless if I'm on TV or handheld mode.
And sharing screenshots from the game on twitter look kinda awkward bc of the small font. Compare that to Animal Crossing, which uses a big bold font that you can easily read without zooming in.
Wake up honey! Design Doc upload another Good Design, Bad Design video!
I keep forgetting that TMA sponsors youtubers sometimes, that ad took me off guard-
Hmm, why do I get the feeling we'll be seeing P5 Strikers someday soon...
I swear every time I see it I just wanna buy it immediately
... Even though I'm playing P5R for the first time right now xD
oh hey it's that podcast that took over my entire tumblr dash for a while
the shipping was such that you probably wouldn't be able to tell it was a horror podcast
For most of the Mario segment I completely forgot that this was about graphic design.
The menu of The Wither is making my head hurt like there is so much different tiny little icon everywhere it's making the whole looking so messy
Hi, just recently discovered and seen the all 12 videos. :)
Some good designs that I didn't saw in you videos:
- Marc Eckō's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure - menu design and while doing graffiti
- Darkest Dungeon - the great character, background, barks(bubles with mesages during fights), and onne of the most interesting: while attacking or defending, it seems like a cut scene but are actually just images slowly moving that gives the impressions of a cut scene
- Split/Second - minimalistic hud
- Crysis 1 - having diegetic hud (i remeber that you could look at the weapon and modify things... do not remeber what exactly, played it in 2007)
Bad design that I didn't saw in you videos:
- Dragon's Dogma - having 2 separate menus for equipping weapons and armours and then having other menu for the consumable
- Skyrim - inventory items
Yesss I always look forward to these!
Wasn't expecting the magnus archives sponsor.
For a bad design candidate: I'd say the levelup indication in Loop Hero. All the other information seems pretty intuitive and well-telegraphed, but it's super easy to not notice from the sound cue _or_ the visuals that your hero has leveled up and can add a perk.
'what is this unique font used in VEXX"
It's the font Exocet. If you've played DIablo or Diablo II, it's instantly recognizable as the font those games use for everything.
One of my favourite series. I'm so in love with good UI.
These serve as basic lessons in graphic design AND I LOVE IT!! Don't stop making these.
Good video, as per usual I *slammed* that like button as soon as I saw Pyre on display. Highly recommend this overlooked gem to anyone reading this.
the display font vexx uses on the main menu is called "diablo" how much you wanna bet they chose it just because of the edge font name
Can you talk about how important it is to know what platform your game is going to be compatible with and how important it is to build with that?
I think Phobies needs to hear this
Note on the Witcher UI: it was designed for a 4:3 computer monitor; played at a 1080x1260 resolution. Anything greater or 16x9 and the UI scales and stretches weirdly. Not defending bad design, but when played as originally intended, on a 2007 era PC with a CRT monitor, it's nowhere near as bad.
Omg i was NOT excpecting you to talk about Vexx. I have so much nostalgia for that game
I actually played Vexx all the way until the final boss ... and got confused by how to beat him ... I don't remember if I ever bothered looking for a walkthrough to figure it out
I actually liked the text ... it felt right for the world they were trying to create ... that idea that it was like a foreign language being translated as it was spoken ... yes, exactly
You should check out "The Caligula Effect", both the original and the updated release as both a bad design and good design respectively.
EDIT: Oh and one other game you could check is Hellsinker. That game is kinda infamous for it's UI, both for how well it fits the style the game is going for, but also for being incredibly unintuitive.
Got the first on Switch last week
Saw a few vids of the Vita version. Kinda glad for the update! XD
And the next comes out on June! (JP)
Regarding text: YES! I hate most pixel-art indie games' text, I find pixel fonts are usually close to unreadable for me. I pointed this out on r/gamedev and they whined at me "but but but my aesthetic vision", well, that's great, but if I can't read your text, I can't play your game and if I can't play your game, your aesthetic vision really doesn't mean shit.
Loop Hero has some really good alternate text options you can choose between that I think is a great fix for the artistry/usability problem.
One old and outdated game design mechanic that desperately needs modernization are random encounters within monster-collecting video games. I'm talking like every five steps you take and Bam! Another fight comes up (think Mt Moon from the Pokemon franchise).
Some games have fixed this issue by implementing over-world encounters, some of my favorite examples include Dragon Quest XI and even Pokemon Let's Go. After being exposed to over-world encounters, it's really tough for me to slog through games that use random encounters throughout an area or a dungeon. Good game design is *always* appreciated
I really loved how Total War: Three Kingdoms used its five colour coded character classes to deliniate not only combat roles, but troop choices, city buildings, technology, and more together. So you knew that if a guy had a grey icon, he was a Sentinel, who excelled at defense and had the tankiest troops. But you also knew that he'd benefit from items in the grey branch of the tech tree, and in that area of the tech tree you'd see a lot of stuff about industry. When you went to the city building screen, you'd see all the buildings related to industry were coded grey, and if you placed a Sentinel in an administrative role, he'd give you bonuses to your industry. Rinse and repeat for each of the five classes.
Bowser's Fury really is a great surprise.
Its funny you say that about bowsers fury because there were amazing 3d platformers like Jak and Daxter doing this in 2001. The precursor Legacy was always extremely my cup of tea. Some fairly challenging platforming mixed with exploration and a structured open world. Yes please
I've been playing Yakuza 7 lately, and for those games I really like to turn off the minimap and UI to really enjoy learning the layout of the city. That said, this game specifically has a little "R" button toggle that's used to show or hide your party health and you can't hide, and it always stays in this awkward spot right next to where the minimap *would* be. It's maddening.
This is awesome, I can't wait to binge watch this series when it's over!
Hades is beautiful and charming and I love it but it NEEDS an option to increase the font size. It's the first game in years I've had to sit closer to the TV to be able to read at times.
That's true. If I'm too lazy to move closer to the screen I just skip the dialogue. Who knows how many potential witty jokes I've missed.
I know people love mario bowser's fury seamless approach but it stresses me out. I love hub worlds especially if it's a different pace or style of gameplay for a breather and way to bookend play sessions.
Yep; I think that issue is only compounded by Fury Bowser himself. You can never fully relax or hang out in a peaceful area, because there is always a ticking clock countdown to chaos.
Thanks for a great advert for The Magnus Archives!
I remember loving Vexx as a kid. tho it was so hard to beat. especially the final boss. I didnt expect to see it here in bad design, but it makes sense when you explain it.
These videos are underrated. They are very educational about graphic design, but are clean and use good examples.
Man, I really enjoy your videos about design, thank you!
How about a video on combat UI, I think Ar Tonelico 2 has a really good whixh manages to balancd style yet practicality
Oh my God! 8:37 Vexx was one of my first Games i played on the Orginal Xbox
That it just shows up here
Nice
I was so sure that it was a forgotten game
holy shit... Vexx! Now that brings back memories. I wish i finished that game back in the day.
Isn't the Witcher UI that small, because it scales with the resolution? Half Life 1 has a tiny hud on 1080p, while 480p glory has it quite big.
Btw you should talk about Wipeout 3 or HD sometime :)
Great video as ever nonetheless
Every time I CrossCode is included in any RUclips video it fills me with so much joy
9:32 I'm pretty sure the body text font is the _Diablo I_ and _Diablo II_ custom fonts, further evidence in the menu where you see the capital "O" with a cross inside it (8:50).
I noticed it instantly. All three Diablo games used the font. While Diablo I used it pretty much everywhere - which looks dated but isn't that hard to read, Diablo II used a more readable font for dialog, and Diablo III pretty much limits the original font to menu headings and such. Diablo IV seems to be using it even less, though it's still present in existing alpha screens. I feel like with Vexx it wasn't just a case of using a poor font choice, but also using font settings and animations that made it even more difficult to read.
This channel made me love graphic design and realise hoe important it is, thats great
I think this is the first time someone has talked about Vexx since I played it as a child.
Sort of related to the subject matter, I'd like to request not using preview/thumbnail images on RUclips with a lot of red color towards the bottom edge.
It can make the red progress bar practically invisible, so it's difficult to see if you've watched/finished a video already.
3:45 That's a sweet transition.
And one game I now found that I think that maybe you should check as it occupies a pretty peculiar spot.
Cruelty Squad.
Actually I just remembered: You know what game took an innovative and surprisingly logical approach to overworld design? Clash at Demonhead. It looks like your typical Mario 3 style map, but each point actually represents one of the two end points of the level, and the lines between them are the levels themselves. You select one of the routes branching off from where you are and that's the level you play, and you can even run a level backwards (yes, literally right-to-left) if you approach it from the other end. And you can't just waltz past levels you've already cleared if your route takes you back around, either. I can't vouch for the game itself as a platformer, but I'm surprised I've never seen another game use that approach. It's made me realize how little sense the Mario 3 approach actually makes when you think about it.
Hello from the future and what the fuck?! The Magnus Archives sponsored Design Doc! What a blessed union!
Did Persona 5 Strikers fix the UI elements Design Doc wasn't a fan of from the original?
The first Witcher is actually my favourite in the series, much better than 2.
They are both pretty janky and unpolished tbh
Kinda surprised they had such a big following, i also understand how Witcher 3 beats them so easily
Nintendo sometimes can miss in making a Hub World, You can see that Zelda Skyward Sword takes some inspiration from Mario 64 hub world but it misses the point in the area used as hub world is the sky were you have to fly wit the Loftwind (bird) and the warp points are very separated from each others so it's sloppy to get from one area to another since most of the sky is empty, navigation is slow, it just has a few rocks wit chests and a couple of enemies
Not to mention that you have to constantly flap your Wii Remote to move around with your bird. It made my arms feel tired, and I dreaded each time I had to go back to the sky.
@@eduardorpg64 I agree, it just a gimmick that feel "fun" the first 5 minutes, but after that it gets annoying fast, hopefully in the remaster they could fix that by making fast travel just like in Botw using the shrines or the travel medallion
I always loooove that Persona BGM at the start.
One of the worst font for text i ever seen in a videogame is the on in Blasphemous. It's based on the style of the old gothic fonts, but it's reduced in size and then it's made all pixellated, making it almost unreadable. It gives me headache every time i try to read one of it's long text, and the game is FULL of them, the whole game story and lore is written in those text too, so if you don't read them you don't even understand what's going on.
On the subject of games that try to avoid menus, let's talk about the prologue in System Shock 2. They built an actual level that you have to go through to access the optional tutorial as well as make the three decisions that determine your character build (which works similarly to the multiple-choice backstory in Mass Effect). But instead of being an immersive part of the story like Vault 101, it's just a series of empty rooms and hallways, with no signs of human activity, because the game wasn't built to handle NPCs or anything that might have made it work. They even spent precious man-hours creating prerendered cutscenes depicting various ships taking off, presumably the ones your character was supposed to be boarding. But they all just look like cheap CGI scenes of generic spaceships taking off. So all it does is waste your time.
God you could do a massive multipart series just on games with text that's too damn small to read. All of your Witcher examples.
I might have missed it if there’s a video I accidentally skipped, but I think you should talk about the good design of AI The Somnium Files, and its recurring UI motifs of diamond-shaped cells, detective noir flourishes, and the subtle eye imagery scattered about. Its really good.
I may be miss remembering but many issues you have with the witcher's UI may be due to your computer's resolution, as honnestly some of them didn't seem to be present back when I played it (although it was some years ago). Have you tried reducing it to see if it fixes some stuff like small icons ?
I would personally love to see Sonic Free Riders covered in a future episode. I don't think Sonic Free Riders was a bad game necessarily, but I feel like the game's menus and how relatively long it takes to make basic selections really don't do the game any favors. In fact, I know people who were turned off from the game, just by how frustrating it can be to get through the menus and to an actual race.
WHAT THE GOLF? SPOTTED. TACTICAL LIKE INBOUND
I really hate all-caps text. I don't understand why the US comics insist on all-caps type when the technical issues of hand-lettering is entirely invalidated by lettering in graphic software.
I recently played Persona 5 and I think I’ve peaked in design. I don’t think I’ll ever see a game that tops that.
I never considered audio design could be part of graphics design. I'd love to see more stuff in good design/bad design that talks about how elements not normally thought of as part of graphics design could be related to graphics design.
I'd like to see a dive into the information presentation in XC2's battle UI. Imo one of the best design showing almost everything you need to know. The only things missing is a better display of the elemental orbs you have already comboed and your current status since you often lose sight of your character when toppled and wonder why nothing is happening on your inputs.
Can you make a video about hidden information?
When its annoying and when its interesting...
I mean EVERY game has hidden information. Just depends on what type of game and the intended experience, but even Tetris relies on hidden information.
@@svenbtb What does tetris hide?
@@gniludio pretty sure there's been a bad design segment on badly hidden information
that bad design logo looking a little cool, not gonna lie. something has been bugging me recently, i have zero knowledge about fonts, i have no idea what all the terms you use means, is there any possibility in a future that you do a 101 font starting video? love your videos btw
Serifs: The little spikes that protrude from the letters in fonts like Georgia or Times New Roman that aren't important parts of the letter.
Line weight: How thick the lines are; some fonts have a consistent weight, while others (again, like Georgia or Times New Roman) use a mix of thick and thin, generally thin for horizontal lines and thick for vertical.
Kerning: Technically means custom rules for how close together certain characters are, but also just used as a catch-all term for the spacing between characters, particularly if there's something wrong that makes it inconsistent.
Ligature: Combining two or more letters into one, for example by crossing a pair of t's with a single line.
Baseline: The bottom edge of a normal letter. Basically where the lines are if you're writing on lined paper.
Glyphs: The individual character forms that make up a specific font. For example, the letter "A" is a character. How the letter "A" looks in Times New Roman is a glyph.
I found the first Witcher menu easier to navigate... I could easily brew potions on the first one, on the second and third the interface was really bad and I tried to spent less time as possible in it, sadly without success.
This has gotten me more interested in Bowser's Fury~
IMO, it's not worth the price of a full game. I wouldn't recommend buying 3D World + Bowser's Fury just for Bowser's Fury. It's good, but a bit short and repetitive. It's definitely a prototype that has been polished and released as bonus content. Honestly, I would not be surprised if they made a proper full game out of it.
If you do care about 3D World though, it's a fantastic game and is definitely worth it, and Bowser's Fury is a good bonus!
Hey, I've been playing Opus Magnum recently, too!
(0:18) Jokes on you, I watch this at 22.02, so the clock has recently struck 22
Talking about the issues with the font in Vexx reminded me again of Blue Reflection. From what I recall, it's a perfectly innocent grotesque font that they somehow managed to just render completely wrong. It's baffling.
design doc video on my birthday cool
I was having so much fun with Opus Magnum and it really is a great game for the most part. But, for me personally I kept getting annoyed at how they'd give you neat new machine parts for one puzzle then take it away immediately without any explanation. And I'll be doing further on puzzles thinking "Man, that elemental wheel thing would be real handy right about now. "
Maybe it's because the list of levels isn't really meant to be linear? I didn't think of it as a linear progression and didn't feel any annoyance about this. In another style, maybe, the level select screen could be a branching tree instead of a linear list...
@@JaneXemylixa Perhaps, but another style is not what I played. I played a linear list of levels with a story that connected them. I don't think it's a bad game by far, but that particular bit did aggravate me. I think if you're going to set up a production puzzle and slowly introduce more tools, then you should design tougher puzzles that require the use of those tools instead of making otherwise easy puzzles harder by taking them away. And if you are going to take them away, at least provide some explanation.
@@weaver7811 Point taken.
The setup of "oh this will be easy- wAIT WHERE IS THE BEST TOOL FOR IT" is a common puzzle design idea. (Baba Is You, for instance, does that a lot: takes away that One Useful Thing and makes you rethink everything)
@@JaneXemylixa Yes, but Baba is you does not have a story threaded through it to which the puzzles are directly connected. [Or one at all really.] Baba is You doesn't need to explain why 'that one thing' is missing because it doesn't set up an expectation for it to explain *anything*.
Opus Magnum however has a story, that solving the puzzles directly progresses. They explain what you're making each time and why. It keeps track of how much money the parts would have cost. The framework of the puzzles is a machine that exists physically within that world. They even give some of the specific parts interesting names that suggest their designer and some history.
The first puzzle in chapter three gives you a Van Berlo's wheel to work with. The theme of the entire chapter is the characters having to procure resources. But this incredibly useful part of the machine they just used for alcohol separation suddenly can't be used to then build a water purifier. And it's an issue backwards too. "Where did this part come from? This would have been super handy in that last puzzle!".
As I said, it's a personal annoyance. I'm not saying the game is bad for doing this or that other people should be bothered, but I think my reason for being annoyed is fairly valid. They soak the mechanics of it in this super interesting story but then make the parts available almost seem arbitrary from puzzle to puzzle, which stands out exceptionally so when the characters are in dire straits and you'd think they'd want to use every advantage they possibly could.
@@weaver7811 I understand now. I agree that it can feel gratuitous. (I don't even know how I wasn't annoyed by it, even though I'm a rare person who was, in fact, in it for the story as well.)
Where's my notification youtube!? I RANG THE BELL RUclips!