Blog Response: Visual Design of Games

Cheese or Font Exercises

Game Elements

  • Core
    • “PLAY QUIZ” button
    • Name of item to guess
    • Answer box
    • Previous/next item buttons
    • Score
    • Timer
    • “REPLAY” button
    • Pause button
    • “Give Up” button
  • Supportive
    • Table of names and guesses
    • Column titles (“Cheese or font?”, “Enter C or F”)
    • Hint text for wrong answers on Sardo and Taleggio (“There are 19 fonts”, “There are 31 cheeses”)
  • Extraneous
    • Flavor text for wrong answers (excluding Sardo and Taleggio)
    • Average score
    • Flavor text for score
    • Average friend score
    • End of game buttons (replay, next quiz, quiz stats, challenge friends, random quiz)

Enter the Gungeon

Enter the Gungeon is a great example of a beautiful bullet hell game that utilizes various design principles to make the experience cohesive.
Color and contrast are properly used to make projectiles thematic while also distinguishable from the background setting.
Alignment and proximity are used in placing the various aspects of the UI in the corners of the screen. The player’s resources are located on the top right (health, keys, etc.), details about the weapon are on the bottom right, items are on the bottom left, and the boss’s health bar is on the right-hand side. In a standard level, the minimap would be on the top right.
Sizing is also key for these UI elements – numbers and icons are large enough to be recognizable at a glance but small enough to not clog up the precious screen space needed to show all the bullets you have to dodge.
The typography and fonts chosen for the text in the game are on theme with its pixelated 8-bit-eqsue art

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