Today Google announced that Picnik would be closing on April 19th. It’s a sad day for me. It’s a sad day for the Picnik team. Most importantly, it’s a sad day for Picnik users. As a member of Team Picnik for almost four years, today was a rough one. Sure my job is secure, my team is still together (somewhat,) but the product we all poured our lives into is going away. It’s hard. Yet, it’s not about us. It’s never been about us, and frankly, that’s what made Picnik great.
This summer while my wife and I were traveling on vacation we stopped at a small bed and breakfast in Anaconda, Montana. At breakfast we met a mother and daughter from California. When the topic of where we worked came up I mentioned I worked as a designer for Picnik. The mother and the daughter both became super excited and told me how much they loved Picnik, talked about their favorite features, and told me what they did with the product. It was great. It was a great reminder of who we were and really who we made Picnik for.
When were were told that Picnik would be shut down, that mother and daughter we met in Montana kept coming to mind. In the end it’s not about us, it’s about you. Our users. You’re the ones who really suffers with this shut down. Not Google. Not the Picnik team. Not our API partners. It’s the people, our users, that made Picnik what it was.
As a proud member of Team Picnik I want to say to all you amazing Picnikers out there, thanks. This shut down sucks. I know. I understand. I commiserate, but remember it was you who made Picnik great. It was you who made it exciting to come into work every day. It’s you who made me smile every single day.
Here’s an understatement: role playing games are complex. If you have any experience with an RPG you understand. The level of complexity packed into these games can be quite impressive. It’s a part of their appeal. Even action RPGs like Runic’s Torchlight still require inventory management, ability/spell selection, stat management and armor outfitting. Things get even more complex with MMORPGs and more classic single player RPGs and as a result of their complexity we’ve been left swimming in row after row of icons, windows, quest panels, conversation bubbles, guild management popups, and on and on and on.
The most complex are the games that seek to recreate the richness present in the old table top systems. These tend to be massive, with expansive worlds, full of rich cultures, unique characters, and deep engaging quests. As a result that level of complexity has, for a long time, left players scrounging in menu after menu. We’ve all been there, and more often than not, leading those games was Bethesda‘s landmark series The Elder Scrolls.
I will fully admit to being a fan of TES games. I have played them all, from Arena to Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion, I have marked many hours in the world of Tamriel. I’ve been a wizard, a warrior, a thief and all manner of combinations in between. However as both a player and a UX professional I have always struggled with Bethesda’s lackluster UI. Frankly they just haven’t been good. Morrowind was a series of windows that were difficult to manage, Oblivion was clunky and frustrating living a bizarre partial existence between the desktop and console worlds. These interfaces have become so commonplace in Bethesda games that when they announced Skyrim, the next chapter in the TES series, I fully intended to be less than thrilled with the game’s UI.
I think I might be wrong.
Before I delve any further, I should point out Skyrim is currently in development, and still months away from release, so we may yet see changes. However the recent gameplay videos that came out of E3 have shown more and more of Skyrim, and while screenshots tend to forgo any HUD or UI we were able to catch a glimpse during a 14-minute interview with Todd Howard on G4. Not only were we allowed to see how the game looks and feels but how the UI works, and based on what I saw, it works well.
Instead of the heavy UI we’ve seen in the past, Bethesda has opted for a clean almost utilitarian design. Gone are the illegible stylized type, parchment backgrounds, and thick wood textured borders. Everything has been streamlined, and as a result the interface takes a back seat to the gameplay. You are in an out of the HUD only spending as little or as much time as you desire. Navigation through the UI is done from a central hub allowing users to move to four distinct sections. Magic. Map. Items. Skills. Each showing a downplayed UI style that gives hints at fantasy elements without being overpowering.
Even the HUD interface is downplayed. A simple and legible typeface has been chosen as opposed to some fantasy-esque script that we’ve seen in the past. Selecting a spell or more powerful shouts, binding weapons and interacting with characters are all done though simple non-intrusive menus. It’s all very Apple-like in form and style, and that’s intentional, in fact in a recent interview with Game Informer, game director Todd Howard had this to say regarding the Skyrim interface:
”You know in iTunes when you look at all your music you get to flip through it and look at the covers and it becomes tangible? One of our goals was ‘What if Apple made a fantasy game? How would this look?’ It’s very good at getting through lots of data quickly, which is always a struggle with our stuff.”
You can see that. While I am no fan of the iTunes UI, taking cues from Apple is a great direction for a game interface. Too often we see UI get bogged down in style and lack in function. Games become over-complicated to a point where they feel over-designed. (Just play some of the free-to-play MMOs out there and you’ll see what I mean.) Seeing Bethesda take this direction is a nice departure from the typical RPG fare and we should be excited about the direction towards a clean and streamlined interface.
So the Xbox 360 has a new controller. If you’re one of the few people who haven’t seen it you can see a video of it here. Not a ton has changed the analog sticks are different and the D-Pad is now a hybrid D-Pad/Disc control something I look forward to messing around with at PAX Prime. The biggest change I noticed was the lack of color, the previous Blue, Yellow, Red, Green color system has been reworked and once color coded buttons have faded into a monochromatic color system of grays.
There hasn’t been an explanation as to why such a drastic change. I suppose it looks slicker… sorta, but it really presents a problem to previous games and game UI which utilized the color scheme inherit in the controller for on screen instructions. Instead of memorizing X, B and Y locations and player could remember a color. A color is much easier for new players to wrap their head around than arbitrary button names, likewise it’s easier to show on screen than small letters that can be hard to read. All however is not lost. Xbox Live’s Major Nelson tweeted earlier:
FYI the grey ABXY buttons are just for this one new controller. It’s not the de facto standard from now on
So this isn’t a sweeping change for all Xbox controllers, it is however, a challenge developers. Now Microsoft has introduced multiple input devices. Where before a developer dealt with one control scheme Microsoft has gone and introduced two. Blue, Yellow, Red and Green are now on the same playing field as Dark Gray, Clear, Light Gray and Clear. (Seriously how does that color scheme even make sense? How would you ever unlock a crate in the original Mass Effect? These are the questions that’ll keep me up at night.)
Take into account, the previous system wasn’t entirely without fault. To a colorblind player the colored control scheme was another monochromatic jumble of yellows. [Seen here] I see two possible directions Microsoft could have gone. The first is a color system that takes into consideration colorblind accessibility and is enforced by Microsoft. The second direction would have introduce LED lights that gave the developers the power to choose their own colors and ultimately be responsible for the accessibility of their own game (and the learning curve introduced by allowing developers to mix up color schemes.) I am more keen on Microsoft being the gatekeeper, it’s better for the players and easier on the developers in the long run and ultimately it makes more sense for player usability, a lot more sense than adding Dark Gray, Clear, Light Gray and Clear into the mix.
About this time last year I wrote a small piece on adding a bit of entertainment to the install process for PC games, citing in particular Blizzard’s World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Litch King, as a good example. I have a feeling that Blizzard is going this direction will all their games, because the same thing happens when you install StarCraft 2. It was a good idea before and it’s a good idea now. The install process is sadly still necessary for PC games and giving the player something to do while waiting for that little progress bar to tick forward is always a nice addition.
Kotaku has the full series telling the entire story if you are interested, check it out here.
I’ve talked about my love for the Brutal Legend menu before, even went as far as describing it as golden, it’s nice to see designers release such an amazing indepth look at their work. Joe Kowalski UI designer on Double Fine‘s Brutal Legend goes into great detail explaining how he created the interactive gate fold album. The After Effect’s flowchart in particular is astounding, showing just how much work such an awesome menu really took.
It’s nice to see UI designers in the game industry showing their work in more detail. It’s this kind of stuff that pushes us to improve, build off of each other successes and continue to not just make great UI but great experiences as well.
