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.

I’m a huge fan of the German board game Carcassonne. It’s easy to figure out and a lot of fun to play. The Xbox Live version of Carcassonne has been out since 2007, and I have spent many an hour challenging my family and friends as we seek to build castles and control land.

According to Kotaku the iPhone version will be released later next month for $5, with the iPad version following shortly there after for a meager $10. Color me excited. I think it’ll be great to see another classic board game ported to the iPad. In my mind, there really isn’t a better platform for board games out there (minus the real life experience of course.) As with other games before, being able to place, rotate and swap tiles the way you would in life using nothing more than touch gestures will really demonstrate the strengths of the multi-touch surfaces for future games.

It won’t get much more real, unless of course you go out and buy the actual Carcassonne. Then after your done, you’ll have to clean it all up and who really wants to spend their time doing that?

This is fantastic. If you watch one video today, make sure this is the one. Last week at DICE, Jesse Schell founder and once creative director of Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio now on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University delves deep into not only the future of games, but the future of technology and how it will interact with our lives. It’s a great talk, and once you should sit down and watch.

Yeah, that’s as awful as I expected it too be.

I love Mass Effect 2. Story wise it’s great, and the UI is much improved over the last game. However the interface is not perfect, it seems while it looks great on an HDTV when it comes to SD televisions the onscreen text shrinks and is unreadable. I wish I could say this shocks me, but having played both Mass Effect and Dragon Age, I can’t say I’m surprised by a BioWare title once again having problems with it’s interface. When it comes to UI their titles constantly been plagued with poor design decisions. Mass Effect 2 was a nice step in the right direction for them, but this SDTV issues have caused a pretty big reaction within the community. It’s a shame that such an amazing title is now shadowed with what really is an easily avoidable problem.

It’s simple, UI designers need to constantly be mindful that not everyone is playing a game on a top-of-the-line system, half of gamers still have standard definition TVs. Half. That’s a big enough percentage that we need to keep the lowest common denominator in mind. Ignoring them is abandoning half your audience. The mobile market is one of the few time where we can guarantee players are going to be experiencing a game the same way as everyone else. When it comes to consoles or PC gaming variables are introduced. Screens change in size, resolutions fluctuate, it should be common place to design around that.

A successful interface, be it menus or the HUD, needs to do two things: 1.) display relevant information, and 2.) do so in a way that the player isn’t pulled out of their experience. An “enhanced” UI can look great on a HDTV but if it doesn’t scale properly, causing information displayed to be unreadable then you haven’t done your job as a UI designer. That’s the truth. No amount of “design choice” can change it.