Good Design, Bad Design Vol. 5 - The Best and Worst of Video Game Graphic Design ~ Design Doc 

ASMR roleplay: You're trying to sleep but your brother is playing Ehrgeiz and he can't decide on what minigame he should pick.

t i n y b a d d e s i g n

I think every episode of this needs one ridiculously bad design one like Ehrgeiz or Gugnir just to give us something to laugh at.

Nintendo: Hey, can I copy your homework? Persona: Yeah but make sure you change some of it. Nintendo: Puts joker in smash Persona: ...

You need to make one on Monster Hunter World. No chickening out.

Hey, the UI of Monster Hunter World is great! ...until you press Start or need to do something in town, anyway. Hooooo boy.

Okay, that last game's sound effect made me laugh out loud. Not only you have great editing, but also pinpoint comedic timing :D

Bad design- Not putting the music used on description

VOLUME 5 IS HERE?! YESSSSS! This is my favorite series of yours, been binging your videos. I really want to get better at designs. It's tough on the brain, but I'm willing.

>notices Eyes of Heaven “Jowo what’s this?”

Ergerhz or sumethin' ...its design is masterclass...it full fill its purpose: gave player headache when they're in the menu.

Best UI design: smash Bros Worst ui design: also Smash Bros

some very interesting information, thank you. - The importance of homogenity and effeciency in UI - How consoles are inherrently more suitable for character control - How ping systems can work great as a friendly multiplayer communication tool - etc.

I hope you cover Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 someday. Still some of the most stylish and clear UI I've seen in any fighting game. Being able to clearly show info in a game super action packed its impressive. And GG Xrd visuals should always get praised

One UI design that I really like is from Valkyria Chronicles. The 4th installment in particular does it particularly well. Navigation is centered around a journal that was gifted the protagonist. Cutscenes are accessed through photos that were taped into the journal and missions are played through torn maps also pasted into the pages of the journal. In each chapter, the empty space on the page is filled with rough looking sketches of things related to the immediate story and scratchy writing. Also there are other details like a flower pressed into the pages in a chapter that takes place in a flowery plain, or water damage on the paper in a chapter that mostly took place during rain. And in gameplay, Valkyria has a unique quirk of having comic book style onomatopoeiae, such as a brightly colored, "Ka-Boom!" when an explosion happens or "Ratta Tatta Tatta" when a machine gun fires. It's fun and unique while not distracting from gameplay. There's also effects when a character receives a change in status. Such as if someone is hit by a mortar while moving, it will slow their movement speed. This is represented by vertical, dark purple streaks appearing around the character momentarily and well as vision becoming blurred and sounds, including the music, being drowned out. Another, simpler example would be when you perform a surprise attack by shooting an enemy from behind, if you don't kill them, they'll turn around and swear droplets will appear around their head.

You made me remember that I really like Skyrim's UI. One bad thing that I have to say about it is that the letters are small and considering that the game takes place on a snowy climate makes it kinda hard to read small white letters even with a black transparent background. But, overall, the menus are very consistent and one big plus about it is the sense of urgency. What I mean is that you mostly are fighting and the menus are quick enough to access to not lose the mood of the moment. For example, if you're in a battle with low health and you level up, you can just (and Skyrim players know about this one): press X (or whatever menu button you have), Up, A, Down down, and you are back to the battle with full health. It just becomes muscle memory. And the Favorite option is also very good... if only it wasnt so small.

Nice video! Yeah, Super Smash Bros Ultimate's main menu UI is certainly a step up from the last game, and with a few exceptions, generally works pretty well. Also agree 100% on how well Pikmin simplified the standard RTS UI for a console audience and how easy it is to pick up and play for new players. As for some examples you may want to think about for future? Well, Smash Bros Ultimate's spirit mode could probably be a good example of both good design and bad design in of itself, since the mode has so many fantastic design decisions... and perhaps an equally high number of terrible ones. It's got a very creative map system, with a design that can also be incredibly confusing to navigate. It's got a whole bunch of things you can do with spirits, that are poorly organised and sorted in a series of menus that feels entirely detached from the rest of the game. And even the way you unlock some of the random spirits seems confusing, like how all the alternate costumes are random shop only deals, how the challenges system, world of light, spirit board, main shop and four world of light shops all have random exclusive spirits, etc. There's probably enough there for a whole video. It'd also be interesting to see what you think of games that deliberately make the UX worse to up the difficulty at various points. Mario & Luigi Dream Team did that with hard mode, where one of their more annoying changes was removing the continue button when you lose and just kicking you straight back to the title screen every time. Definitely bad design in many ways, but it does raise the question of whether bad design is any better or worse if you're deliberately trying to screw over the player rather than it being a mistake.

Still waiting for Pikmin for the Switch...

Awesome! This came just as I was rewatching your earlier videos to direct my design decisions. Hope to see more soon.

I like the idea of finding a counterpart of the good and bad designs like with Smash Ultimate, I think you should do them more often in future videos

5:05 Pretty sure the terrible UI is actually part of the experience. Still, belongs on the list of what not to do.

this feels like whole new knowledge, but NOT BORING

The video opening with Electric Toothbrush playing in tbe background made me very happy 💚

As a MH fan I was curious if it would show up here pointing out some of the bad design. Honestly it would be really interesting if you did a video focusing on the series as a whole (Or even just World), highlighting both the good and the bad.

Yay, Pikmin’s UI finally gets some love!

I think Melee had one of the best smash bros menus. It was simplistic but oozed that grungy feeling of the rest of the game.

As a huge MH fan, I'd actually be interested to see what you have to say about MHW's bad design. There's a lot of stuff changed over from the old games that had me scratching my head to figure out on day 1.

could you please do a more character focused Good Design, Bad Design ???

17:06 That fighting HUD looks almost identical to Tekken 3's. Maybe that's why it looks fine. They just lifted it from something else.

1:50 I never even noticed it was actually using the negative space; that's really cool! 3:55 I just went through the two DLC stages so far and cranked them all up to make it even, a few mains I changed, and the rest I left alone.

Mass Effect's graphics still aren't bad looking at all. They're very clean. For comparison, look at Call of Duty 4 - it's browny-greeny aesthetic combined with unnecessary (and not well managed) amounts of detail don't make it a pleasure to look at. It's only ME's animations that are a bit of a sore to the eyes.

What you were saying about the Ping system in Apex Legends reminds me of the Right Click in Warcraft 2. The game was made in the mid 90's, right around the time Macintosh mouses started having Right Clicks at all. Right Click was absurdly useful, it was like 6 hotkeys in 1 because it had context sensitivity programmed in. If you had a Peasant/Peon selected, right click could tell them to chop wood, mine gold, repair a damaged structure, move to a different spot on the map, attack an enemy unit/structure (though why you'd assign a Peasant/Peon to do that is beyond me), stick to/follow another unit, go inside a transport ship, etc. All things you would only ever want to do on purpose, none of its functions are things you wouldn't want to do on accident. Even if you did somehow input an accidental command, it would take half a second to input a new command to override the old command. It makes the alternative perfectly serviceable individual hotkey command feel almost cumbersome by comparison.

One thing I would add about SSBU is the screens showing enemy spirits in World of Light and the Spirit Board. It's purpose, besides showing the spirit itself, is to give an idea of what battling the spirit will be like. However, a few things make this difficult. The designers limit the conditions menu to three items, which can sometimes lead to them hiding aspects of the battle. This seems to have been done to leave room for the rules section above it - which, from a player's perspective, is pretty much identical in purpose. The worst problem would be how tiny the indicators for non-primary fighters are, especially compared to the primary fighter's full portrait. There were plenty of times I prepared to fight a single foe, only to realise in the loading screen it had two or three allies. If I were to redesign it, I would make the conditions section much bigger, capable of holding eight or even ten lines, and put absolutely everything about the battle under it. I'd also put the portraits of all enemy fighters on the screen, either in full or in cutouts similar to Classic Mode's enemy fighter screen. For fights with the condition "Defeat the primary spirit to win", I'd change it to "1st", "2nd", etc to make it clear who it refers to. I've never studied graphic design or had a job involving it, so I can't say I'm an authority on the subject. These are all just my thoughts as a regular player, but hopefully they're interesting.

I 100% feel you on the smash ultimate music settings. I gave up on setting my music frequency except on a couple specific stages, like Mementos and Umbra Clock Tower

you can press L/R on the smash music slider to increase/decrease in chunks

TF2 also has a voice command feature that lets you communicate with others without a microphone similar to What you described in Apex Legends (There is a spy nearby, incoming, sentry ahead, I'm low on health etc.), except without the pinging

This has become one of my favorite series on RU-vid. Makes me want to make a pretty videogame!

10:02 "There's no new marker" There is! It's the glowing on the left side of the nameplate of the item that indicates that it's new. I know it's been 5 years but no one else has pointed it out. I'm currently working on a game project, myself, so your channel has not only been entertaining, but actively helpful for my development. Most of what I watch from you is a sort of "research" effort.

Hello there, Design Doc! I happened to stumble over your videos and they're really fun to watch! As a suggestion for one of your next videos, try looking at Blue Reflection for the UI design. I think it's really good and simplistic, even if the game is mediocre at best. As a not so ace example, I'd recommend looking at The Last Remnant. I had a blast with this game, but the screen feels a bit overstuffed with information (not half as bad as Gungnir, but eh, close enough).

Your channel inspires me as a Graphic Artist. Thank you Doc.

i love how the tiny bad design is in comic sans

Having a menu option labelled "games & more" in the main menu of a video game is truly the most stupid thing ever. Or close to it.

Really interesting and funny video! I'm not only learning new aspects of Video Game design but you're also introducing me to games I've never played before! Thank you so much! Is there any chance you'll analyze a Kingdom Hearts/Disgaea game in the future?

Good to know I'm not the only one who thought the new custom ruleset system was clunky.

You need more views, man. Your videos are damn good.

You just articulated exactly why I couldn't break through the first Mass Effect's barrier of entry (even though I didn't know why I couldn't get into it at the time). All I ever hear about it is how great of a game series it is, but I will never feel compelled to experience it myself. So tedious.......

I’m glad I’m not the only one who wanted stage hazard as a thing like omega and battlefield

Squad Strike has this KOF style to it when selecting a character, selecting order and the HP heal between fights in Elimination

There is only one game I can think of that chased me away to it's menu and it was the redesign for For Honor. Went from having Icons and names to just Icons. Really didn't feel like learning them. The character select I don't really have a problem with, but now has more wasted space. Used to be columns, then it was groups based on faction. Within a week or two of changes I deleted the game. It's a pretty fun game, was just getting into using optimal armor pieces. Also was one of the games I actually could feel the input lag from being wireless. After I noticed I was no longer able to play it without a wired connection.

I'm surprised you didn't mention the most annoying element of Smash's menu design. When you're choosing characters for a match, the READY TO FIGHT banner goes across the screen when all fighter tokens are placed. And it looks great, like you said, but it goes right across the characters, so if you want to change something, best case scenario the character you want might be hard to find under that banner, and worst case scenario you accidentally start the match before you're ready.

i like how you didnt even bother touching the menus in the adventure mode. ive played through adventure mode dozens of times as i love it, and i still constantly use items on accident and hit the wrong buttons in the menus.

You ought to talk about the Splatoon 2 menu. Especially the Octo Expansion menus, they’re very aesthetically pleasing and clean.

apex's ping system also is a huge accessibility tool for nonverbal and mute people

YES I love this series

I'd argue that there is a point to the order set-up for Squad Strike. It's so you can set the order of your fighters without your opponent knowing. If you could see each other's order, then you could easily pick characters that you know can beat theirs easily. It's a bit more fair this way.

Holy fuck that noise in the Ehrgheiz menu was something else. Wow.

I find it a bit "maybe you have a problem with it, maybe you don't" on the smash bros menu, because I barely have problems with my friends, since we pick our own themes when we want to, since now you can choose pointedly the music you want.

2:33 That dynamic zoom is somewhat inaccurate because it doesn't consider the opponent changing the launch angle and speed... Which makes things even spicier on tournaments because you KNOW he barely survived and if someone dies earlier it's due to a mistake on that directional and launch speed influence (DI and LSI in short)

I played Ehrgeiz from time to time back in 2002, I know the title just now. Oh the sound of menu selection brings back memories.

The Pings in Apex reminds me of Meadow's communication system. The game is a relaxing online experience but it has no chat function at all. No vc, chat box or even phrases. Instead it relies on a series of symbols so people can communicate different things like showing a player a neat area they've found or getting them to help crack open a monolith for collectables. I remember when I was betatesting it there was no symbol for "I'm switching animals"; in order to switch species you had to exit the server and it simply looked like you were leaving. This lead to me returning to find my whole group had gone on without me. I suggested the idea for the symbol and it was added which was great. I probably wasn't the only person who suggested it, but it's nice that Might n Delight obviously listen to their testers.

I love the Erghiez menu sound. It makes me laugh every time

Hey! Can you please make a video on what makes a competitive ("e-sports ready") game competitive?

(3:40) Really needs an instant min, max and default. Say have it be L for off, R for on, and X for default or something. At least that'll speed it up a bit. Maybe also have an all on and all off for each stage so you then can tweak it further.

I think the image chat (forgot what it is really called) from phantasy star online episode 1 and 2 and phantasy star online 2 do i great job of communicating info and the ui to make them isn't hard but free for a lot of expression also you can save ones you have seen

Aww, I really wanted to see you shred Dark Souls' UI to bits.

I spent well over an hour on the stage music options... and I actually enjoyed it! Giving certain Metroid stages mostly Ripley themes, etc. I just WISH that other people would disable the "Gamer" and "25m" track, or at least set it low, so it won't pop up all the time playing online!

Could you please make a mention of the UI for Borderlands 2, I think is a great example for good design oriented to use on the fly weapons comparison while you're still seeing the action on the background especially for online sessions

An undersung ping system is the one in Warframe. It is not quite as robust as the one in Apex legends, but it serves almost all of the same purposes pretty much as well. Unfortunately a lot of players are not even aware of its existence, you pretty much have to look in the key rebinding window to find out how to do it.

Surprised how you didn't note that you couldn't exit from Ehrgeiz's RPG mode without having to reset the console.

It's understated how good the ping system is in Apex. But MOBAs have been doing similar things. You can ping the CD of your skills, how long till someone respawns, who is missing, where you're going, who to focus. But to see it in an FPS that works on consoles is amazing. I wish Overwatch had this. The tab screen in that game gives no useful information. As Zarya I always wish I could ping the CD of my shield. It's such a great feature because not only does it communicate that it is ready, depending on the context it could mean I am suggesting that we go in.

I would love to watch a video about your opinion on DIY HUDs. One great example is FFXIV imo. It lets you have your HUD as minimalistic or as convoluted as you want it to be. And it would be fun to see a graphic designer play around with it x)

Curious to hear what you have to say on Hyrule Warriors. Thanks for the vid, cheers!

Ok, I must admit the last game got me, thanks for the laughs! But I'm really interested in this Design talk about Monster Hunter World (Btw. thank goodness they added a filter for investigations!)

I upvoted this before I even watched it. You do good work sir!

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the recent console edition of Stellaris and how it overcame many of the issues RTS/4X games have on consoles.

hey so I love Hyrule Warriors but I have always felt like it felt really bad in some regards.; I know you skipped over it but I would seriously love if you went over this one

That last one hurt

That last example really surprised me. Like I kept thinking for previous ones, “how did this get past the common sense test?” Well that last example took it several levels deeper. Like why the fuck does that exist?

16:00 For a moment, I thought you were going to talk about the Playstation Mini menu :P Come to think of it... GOOD Design: NES and SNES Classics BAD Design: Playstation Classics

Goddammit, I was really happy when you made like you might do Monster Hunter! As much as I love those games, Capcom has never, _not once,_ brought their UX A-game to the series and it's utterly baffling.

Personally, when I played Oxenfree, I found its graphical design very immersive, fun, and easy to handle. With just one exception... the, uh, what are they? Tape players? I think it'd be cool if you talked about Oxenfree and your thoughts on it in a future instalment of this series.

i never knew you could change party members equipment in mass effect

The ping tool in Portal 2* is brilliant. Ftfy

I'm surprised you didn't mention the character select screen for smash. Seems like an issue for casual players and pros is the fact that instead of sorting characters by game or play style, the characters are played out in a line based on introduction date (mostly). I've been playing the game for months and still cant find characters off hand.

You should do one of these with 999 (DS) as one of the good design ones and 999 (PC) as one of the bad design ones

Had any RTS ever tried implementing touchscreen functionality? I would think that would be a great replacement for the mouse, but I don't recall seeing one using them on the DS/3DS/WiiU/Vita/Smartphone.

I literally just noticed you changed the channel name tell CooVee that on a whim, i stubbornly tried to revive his Paper Mario videos via Internet Archive a few months ago, but none of them were archived

Ya know, everything you said about Mass Effect's UI reminded me exactly of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance's UI, too, it's simply too much of a mess. There is literally no way to compare weapons when you want to equip them, so you'd have to go from the equipment screen to the stats screen each time you wanted to compare old equipment. Rinse and repeat if what you equipped is actually worse! It uses simply too many menus for what easily could be turned into a single one: you had to press select, then go down a few options to select System, then go down a few options again to select saving the game, then have to confirm you do want to save the game, then mash the B button to go back all those annoying menu screens. And also just how annoying and confusing it was to select each character. And then after selecting the character was another prime example of too many menus in the game: good luck sorting through stats, equipment, abilities, and classes! This problem could have been solved using 'hotkeys' like in Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, a game that, while also sins of having too many menu screens, at least you can memorize button combinations to be able to skip those annoying menus. Kudos to Final Fantasy Tactics A2 for fixing literally every issue with menus the first game had: shame on it for making everything far more worse to the point the menu fixes weren't even worth it.

It’s like deadly premonition took one look at the logo for donkey kong country tropical freeze’s logo and said “That’s not enough fonts” and decided to give literally every Ui element a different font. 😂

So if SSBU got inspired by P5, then which direction does it go when Joker arrives?

Please mention Ōkami on the next video! It's such an awesome, underrated game!

There is one choice I deeply hate in Smash Ultimate. When you play in Spirit mode and go to change your character, the screen is covered up in a huge FIGHT! button that covers the selection grid while your previous character is selected. Needless to say I went to that screen because I want to change my character, instead of a giant confirm button I should be brought to the grid, preferably with a hovering cursor as I am about to select someone else.

"The 1st Mass Effect is amazing." As a person whos played through the Mass Effect series multiple times that phrase is definitely a first.

7:54 I can't focus on the lesson over that cute pose please

13:00 Another strength of pc is quick buttons. Since the keyboard has a practically infinite amount of buttons. On a gamepad the button number is more limited.

(3:10) And the whole "Special Smash" mode should have just been moved into rules. Want to change character scale? Have that as a percentage; and you can apply it to any game mode where you can set the rules. - That gives flexibility.

“Talks about anything respawn related “ Ah yes good food

What's Design Doc saying at 16:48ish? While focused on the weird memory card menu thing? I can't tell what what one word is, it sounds like "newmorphic"?

I hope that when they add joker he would change the ui of the champion screen to look like persona's UI.

Thanks, Doc.