Thoroughly confusing game. No, I should say: thoroughly confusing user interface. Some explanation would be good! For example: on the bottom of the screen are circles. I take it these represent the “rules” that the drawn path fulfills? But what does it mean when instead of circles, there’s a single outline oval (well, a roundrect, but let’s not quibble)? Is that… a single rule? Something else? Why does this level (1-1-4) have this oval when the previous three levels have two circles?
I clicked around essentially at random until I got “level completion”. It turned out that, yes, this oval/roundrect did indeed represent a single rule. I still don’t know:
Why an oval instead of a single circle? This is a very odd, and gratuitously confusing, visual design choice.
Why does this level have one rule where the previous three levels have two rules?
What is that rule?
I reserve my judgment on gameplay until I’ve played a little longer, but as far as the UI design goes—thumbs down.
tl;dr: The rule circles in the last screen of each level are hidden for game design reasons. This is indicated by the oval shape over the area where the circles would usually be.
First a meta comment: Yeah, the game could be more clear about that. I suspect that the reason why the game doesn’t explain this detail is that explaining details in-game requires language, which requires translation to a ton of languages, which is costly for a small developer. So indie games instead lean on existing intuitions, on nonverbal communication, and on players figuring things out by trial and error. Usually that works out fine; sometimes it doesn’t, even in high-budget games. I managed to play one of the AAA Dark Souls games for 30 hours before understanding some central mechanic, which was surely not intended by the devs...
Now, on to your actual question. First, my terminology: The game consists of regions, levels, and screens. 1-1-4 would be the fourth screen of the first level in the first region. Each level (like 1-1) has a unique set of rules to figure out, but these remain the same between screens, so 1-1-4 has the same rules as 1-1-1 to 1-1-3.
Because the game’s main challenge is usually to discover the rules in a level, but the game can only test this by asking for valid paths, many early levels would be easy to solve by purely brute-force drawing of paths without actually understanding the level’s rules. The rule circles (= one circle per unique rule which the path must fulfill in this level) are very helpful to discover the rules but also help for brute-forcing (“just draw a path on each screen until all circles light up”). So that’s presumably why the dev hid these rule circles on the final screen of each level.
Anyway, I appreciate this comment, because seeing such a different experience really makes it clear that people engage with stuff from different starting points, priors, preconceptions, etc. In this case, I could not have predicted that someone would stumble on that part, specifically. (This is not meant as a criticism; I stumble on lots of things that are obvious for others—just rarely in gaming, with which I’ve grown up.)
One final point: One of my prerequisites for recommending this game was that I developed so-called “trust in the developer”. That is, I also had some suboptimal experiences early on (in that I managed to solve 2-ish early levels without being able to articulate the rules), which made me doubt the competence of the dev; but as I played more, my doubts were continually resolved, and by the end when I struggled with a level I had enough trust in the dev not to second-guess them. But developing trust doesn’t always happen (whether it would be warranted or not), and when it doesn’t, puzzle games become a chore, since it makes one second-guess everything: “maybe the dev is incompetent”, “maybe my solution doesn’t work because the game is bugged”, etc.
Anyway, I hope you’ll come to enjoy the game. But if you don’t, Steam has a no-questions-asked refund policy within 2h of playtime and 14 days of purchase.
First a meta comment: Yeah, the game could be more clear about that. I suspect that the reason why the game doesn’t explain this detail is that explaining details in-game requires language, which requires translation to a ton of languages, which is costly for a small developer. So indie games instead lean on existing intuitions, on nonverbal communication, and on players figuring things out by trial and error.
It’s possible that this is indeed the reason that the developer would give (I really couldn’t say, so let’s assume so)—but if so, it would be a very lazy excuse. Nothing prevents you from putting in icons and text! (Indeed, that’s the standard approach to such things, in UX design.) And then, if translating/localizing said text is too much work (which is likely), you can just… not translate it. Anyone who doesn’t speak English can rely on the the icons. But most people who’ll be playing the game do speak English, so this would be strictly superior, and massively so.
This seems uncharitable. The real world is more complicated than that, so things are almost never strictly superior. (Usually the answer to “why don’t people pick up this free 20-dollar-bill on the ground?” is “it doesn’t exist”.)
Specifically with regards to translations, a dev tells Steam which languages their game is available in, and then Steam displays this game only to customers who both understand these languages and have told Steam that they want to see games in those languages. (I suspect other app stores have similar policies?) So you either fully translate your game, or lose sales, or lie to a store that could kick you off for lying. In case of Understand, the dev chose to make a game with basically no in-game text, and a fully translated store page.
But most people who’ll be playing the game do speak English
This is possibly true, but not necessarily so. For instance, here is the Steam language user survey for August 2021. The direct English-speaking proportion is only 33.6%, and I don’t know what percentage of Chinese- or Russian-speaking Steam users can also speak English.
Finally, if most people on Steam spoke Chinese rather than English, I suspect you would not advocate for games to display icons + Chinese text, if translating stuff was too cumbersome.
If Steam policy is as you say, then we can certainly blame Steam for the UI being bad—we can say “Steam policies enforce bad UIs”—but in no way whatsoever does that make the UI less bad, nor does it make a hypothetical UI just like this one except with English text any less strictly superior.
I do not agree that “things are almost never strictly superior”. In my experience (and UX design and software development is what I do for a living), things are often strictly superior. People’s reasons for not doing the strictly superior thing are bad reasons much more often than they are good reasons.
I’d definitely prefer just icons to “icons plus text in a language I don’t understand”. The text would be visually distracting, and I’d be wondering what it meant and whether it was trying to tell me something I hadn’t yet figured out.
This is an easily solvable problem: allow the user to toggle the text labels off (but default to them being on).
Folks, these are not new UX design challenges. On the contrary, they are long-solved problems; they’ve been solved for decades. There is no reason to suddenly reinvent the wheel, or to start violating established best practices. Doing so will just result in confused and annoyed users—as it has here.
Honestly I don’t think that would solve it for me? For one I need to find, without text, the way to turn the labels off. For two, even if I succeed, it won’t be visually distracting any more but I’ll still be wondering what it meant and whether it was trying to tell me something I hadn’t yet figured out.
Thoroughly confusing game. No, I should say: thoroughly confusing user interface. Some explanation would be good! For example: on the bottom of the screen are circles. I take it these represent the “rules” that the drawn path fulfills? But what does it mean when instead of circles, there’s a single outline oval (well, a roundrect, but let’s not quibble)? Is that… a single rule? Something else? Why does this level (1-1-4) have this oval when the previous three levels have two circles?
I clicked around essentially at random until I got “level completion”. It turned out that, yes, this oval/roundrect did indeed represent a single rule. I still don’t know:
Why an oval instead of a single circle? This is a very odd, and gratuitously confusing, visual design choice.
Why does this level have one rule where the previous three levels have two rules?
What is that rule?
I reserve my judgment on gameplay until I’ve played a little longer, but as far as the UI design goes—thumbs down.
I think the UI is following the same principle as the game itself: You have to try to understand what it does from the few cues that you get.
That may be a good principle of game design, but it is an extremely bad principle of UX design.
I agree :-)
tl;dr: The rule circles in the last screen of each level are hidden for game design reasons. This is indicated by the oval shape over the area where the circles would usually be.
First a meta comment: Yeah, the game could be more clear about that. I suspect that the reason why the game doesn’t explain this detail is that explaining details in-game requires language, which requires translation to a ton of languages, which is costly for a small developer. So indie games instead lean on existing intuitions, on nonverbal communication, and on players figuring things out by trial and error. Usually that works out fine; sometimes it doesn’t, even in high-budget games. I managed to play one of the AAA Dark Souls games for 30 hours before understanding some central mechanic, which was surely not intended by the devs...
Now, on to your actual question. First, my terminology: The game consists of regions, levels, and screens. 1-1-4 would be the fourth screen of the first level in the first region. Each level (like 1-1) has a unique set of rules to figure out, but these remain the same between screens, so 1-1-4 has the same rules as 1-1-1 to 1-1-3.
Because the game’s main challenge is usually to discover the rules in a level, but the game can only test this by asking for valid paths, many early levels would be easy to solve by purely brute-force drawing of paths without actually understanding the level’s rules. The rule circles (= one circle per unique rule which the path must fulfill in this level) are very helpful to discover the rules but also help for brute-forcing (“just draw a path on each screen until all circles light up”). So that’s presumably why the dev hid these rule circles on the final screen of each level.
Anyway, I appreciate this comment, because seeing such a different experience really makes it clear that people engage with stuff from different starting points, priors, preconceptions, etc. In this case, I could not have predicted that someone would stumble on that part, specifically. (This is not meant as a criticism; I stumble on lots of things that are obvious for others—just rarely in gaming, with which I’ve grown up.)
One final point: One of my prerequisites for recommending this game was that I developed so-called “trust in the developer”. That is, I also had some suboptimal experiences early on (in that I managed to solve 2-ish early levels without being able to articulate the rules), which made me doubt the competence of the dev; but as I played more, my doubts were continually resolved, and by the end when I struggled with a level I had enough trust in the dev not to second-guess them. But developing trust doesn’t always happen (whether it would be warranted or not), and when it doesn’t, puzzle games become a chore, since it makes one second-guess everything: “maybe the dev is incompetent”, “maybe my solution doesn’t work because the game is bugged”, etc.
Anyway, I hope you’ll come to enjoy the game. But if you don’t, Steam has a no-questions-asked refund policy within 2h of playtime and 14 days of purchase.
Briefly commenting on this part:
It’s possible that this is indeed the reason that the developer would give (I really couldn’t say, so let’s assume so)—but if so, it would be a very lazy excuse. Nothing prevents you from putting in icons and text! (Indeed, that’s the standard approach to such things, in UX design.) And then, if translating/localizing said text is too much work (which is likely), you can just… not translate it. Anyone who doesn’t speak English can rely on the the icons. But most people who’ll be playing the game do speak English, so this would be strictly superior, and massively so.
This seems uncharitable. The real world is more complicated than that, so things are almost never strictly superior. (Usually the answer to “why don’t people pick up this free 20-dollar-bill on the ground?” is “it doesn’t exist”.)
Specifically with regards to translations, a dev tells Steam which languages their game is available in, and then Steam displays this game only to customers who both understand these languages and have told Steam that they want to see games in those languages. (I suspect other app stores have similar policies?) So you either fully translate your game, or lose sales, or lie to a store that could kick you off for lying. In case of Understand, the dev chose to make a game with basically no in-game text, and a fully translated store page.
This is possibly true, but not necessarily so. For instance, here is the Steam language user survey for August 2021. The direct English-speaking proportion is only 33.6%, and I don’t know what percentage of Chinese- or Russian-speaking Steam users can also speak English.
Finally, if most people on Steam spoke Chinese rather than English, I suspect you would not advocate for games to display icons + Chinese text, if translating stuff was too cumbersome.
If Steam policy is as you say, then we can certainly blame Steam for the UI being bad—we can say “Steam policies enforce bad UIs”—but in no way whatsoever does that make the UI less bad, nor does it make a hypothetical UI just like this one except with English text any less strictly superior.
I do not agree that “things are almost never strictly superior”. In my experience (and UX design and software development is what I do for a living), things are often strictly superior. People’s reasons for not doing the strictly superior thing are bad reasons much more often than they are good reasons.
I’d definitely prefer just icons to “icons plus text in a language I don’t understand”. The text would be visually distracting, and I’d be wondering what it meant and whether it was trying to tell me something I hadn’t yet figured out.
This is an easily solvable problem: allow the user to toggle the text labels off (but default to them being on).
Folks, these are not new UX design challenges. On the contrary, they are long-solved problems; they’ve been solved for decades. There is no reason to suddenly reinvent the wheel, or to start violating established best practices. Doing so will just result in confused and annoyed users—as it has here.
Honestly I don’t think that would solve it for me? For one I need to find, without text, the way to turn the labels off. For two, even if I succeed, it won’t be visually distracting any more but I’ll still be wondering what it meant and whether it was trying to tell me something I hadn’t yet figured out.