Industrial Evolution - UI Nightmare

Hey all,

while creating the user interface for Industrial Evolution, I was focused on the PC experience. This is not a good practice when creating a game for both PC and mobile platforms.

So let’s get into the problems I’m facing while designing the Industrial Evolution UI.

Readability

Due to the differences in screen size, PC and mobile user interfaces are made in very different ways. While PC games might have more information on the screen, mobile games generally have quite simple UIs tailored specifically for touchscreens.

In the current build of Industrial Evolution, which as of writing is Pre-Alpha 1.1, there are certain text elements, that are unnecessarily small, such as the text for inputs and outputs of a recipe. This is already quite hard to read in the default windowed resolution on PC, let alone on mobile.

So how can I fix it?

Just making the text size bigger is not the best solution, as it makes the UI feel clunky, but right now, due to the amount of work, that redesigning the whole UI from scratch would take, I feel like it’s the best short term option.

I have already made this change, and it makes the UI on PC too big in my opinion. I haven’t tested it on mobile yet though, so we’ll see how that turns out.

Tutorials

When opening the game for the first time, a player doesn’t know anything. What can they click on? What does a certain UI element do? Is it only a visual element? A tutorial would certainly help. It would explain what to do. But a tutorial won’t fix the underlying issue, which is the confusing and cluttered UI.

Summary

So the UI in Industrial Evolution has a problem. It’s too small, confusing and cluttered and there are 3 ways of fixing the issue:

1. Remaking the entire UI from scratch - This is arguably the best way, but it would take a lot of time and effort.
2. Making the text bigger - This is an okay way of making the UI bigger and less cluttered, but it doesn’t fix the confusing nature of the UI.
3. Making tutorials - This is basically just putting a band-aid on the problem, but it might clear up the confusion.

So what do you think? What should I do about the UI?

Should I remake the UI from scratch or should I write some tutorials?