I know it isn’t completely trivial, but as someone with many years of experience making (small) indie games, I know for a fact that a menu like that it should only be changing a few global variables. It’s a frontend with very little backend to consider.
Something like that is not a year’s work. I could agree with a month, and even at that, most of it will be testing, not design.
And tbh - the main problem with it isn’t even its design (the design is fine) just its controls. You inexplicably have to use the D-pad for character select, but the analog stick for everything else, apart from switching to difficulty select with R2. Why not navigate the whole menu with either D-pad or left stick? That should only take a week to fix at the absolute maximum, unless they’ve managed to tie the code in a spaghettified knot that’s unnecessarily coupled with actual game mechanics.
AAA gamedev here. I agree in principle with the gamefeel critiques, but I’d like to bring up that scale absolutely matters here. Every degree of complexity your codebase adds can cause cascading issues, which is one of the million reasons indie devs are told by everyone to keep their game scope small. Not saying these kinds of games shouldn’t improve, but it’s not as trivial as it might appearr.
The ROR2 new game menu has only a few elements:
That’s it.
I know it isn’t completely trivial, but as someone with many years of experience making (small) indie games, I know for a fact that a menu like that it should only be changing a few global variables. It’s a frontend with very little backend to consider.
Something like that is not a year’s work. I could agree with a month, and even at that, most of it will be testing, not design.
And tbh - the main problem with it isn’t even its design (the design is fine) just its controls. You inexplicably have to use the D-pad for character select, but the analog stick for everything else, apart from switching to difficulty select with R2. Why not navigate the whole menu with either D-pad or left stick? That should only take a week to fix at the absolute maximum, unless they’ve managed to tie the code in a spaghettified knot that’s unnecessarily coupled with actual game mechanics.
AAA gamedev here. I agree in principle with the gamefeel critiques, but I’d like to bring up that scale absolutely matters here. Every degree of complexity your codebase adds can cause cascading issues, which is one of the million reasons indie devs are told by everyone to keep their game scope small. Not saying these kinds of games shouldn’t improve, but it’s not as trivial as it might appearr.