A Question of Polish.

A suggestion if I may...

To polish a game is to add those final touches or improvements to ensure your game is as aesthetically pleasing and error-free as possible. Although considered to be the last step in the game development process, it's one of the most important. Adding polish is the secret to making better games.
- Crump, Tiana. "Game Dev 101: Adding Polish to Games"

Consider the beautiful game launcher:



Now observe the launcher without any padding/margins:



Not really so pretty anymore, is he?

The dialogue box doesn't have sufficient margins, look:



Here is a tiny tweak:



Aaah, much better, just like the launcher now, a nice bit of padding for the words to breathe and a border to define it nicely.

This isn't about the functionality of the UI (although that is also very important).

This is essentially what I would deem a quick fix. It may seem irrelevant to some but you should never, ever, underestimate the value of aesthetics. I firmly believe that fixing little things like this, if they did a look & feel polish pass across the board, that it would go a long way in helping the image of the game.

But first, I suppose, one must recognize and appreciate the importance of polish and then take it seriously as a core part of a game's development.

 

But you know, you need not stop there, if you were feeling mad fancy like, you could even add some creative borders to the whole affair (if it turns out there's some sort of technical issue with margins):



Or something a little more adventurous, maybe dare I say it... a little risqué? Something like this perhaps:



Look! here's our friend Yang, his world has a nice amount of margin and some setting appropriate borders:



What a lucky chappy!

 

Tune in next week folks, where we tackle the subject of kerning! Yay!

 

I'd also like to suggest a tweak to the background transparency for all windows. Being able to read the text on them gets hard when you have windows behind them.

 

A slider in the options menu could be nice.

 

Is this a joke I'm not getting because I see no difference in the images from this post or the one above......

 

New UI soon!(TM)

See how things are then!

 

Polish is so 2018! Ooops, guess it got pushed back to eternity.

Unless it's endless shuffling of papers in the combat department. We can polish that forever!

I would dig up my "finish stuff" list from last year, but why bother? I've beat my face bloody already.

Thanks for continuing to try though. We did get a font enlargement through after 3 years of trying, maybe margins can come in 2023.

 

Great (and straightforward) suggestions in this thread for the devs to take note of.

 

don't force more margins on people. they're pretty, but not everyone has your screen size.

 

The left+right dialogue borders on the second picture are wider

 

Oh... I guess the impact is not a lot huh since it wasn't noticable. lol. Maybe we should focus on more noticable and impactful changes huh?? Just an idea.

 

In regards to the kerning its an actual typeface they are using rather than an image file of formatted text, isn't it? That makes it a little trickier.

Things like this are fairly smooth but all kinds of bizarre things take place and a devilish amount of contingencies pop up. I'm sure they'll get around to it, but like you said this isn't exactly top of the bug list, and while seemingly simple fixing one thing here can break another thing there. I wouldn't be surprised if instead of polishing this or that they just dropped an entirely new and for all intents and purposes "completed" UI system on it.

 

Sometimes less is more. Small changes can go a long way to making a game look more professional and "polished".

Also big changes take a lot of time/work... this is a tiny yet pretty decent improvement that could be switched almost instantly.

 

I dunno about that, my screen resolution is only 1680 x 1050.

 

It's not just that though. (Although it is important as it's the frikkin' main "portal" to the game's lore)

Here's a good quote on polish from Rod Fergusson, an executive producer at Epic Games: "Polish, to me, is the last 10 to 20 percent of effort where everything in the game is now working and you take the time to focus on the little details that have a big impact on the overall quality of the game, polish is extremely important, as it has the ability to take a good game and make it great."

Robomodo's Patrick Dwyer: "For a designer, polishing means can we make the game more fun. For an artist, polishing means can it look better. For an engineer, polishing means is it optimized."

Dan Rubalcalba from Obsidian: "For me, polish has always been fixing multiple small issues and adding tiny features that really smooth off the edges of gameplay, I say 'small' in that each issue on their own might not be noticed, but it is the summation of many of them that turns something interesting into something great. Polish is no small task; it is just about small unseen things."

Frank Kowalkowski, also from Obsidian: "Polish is often adding things nobody will ever notice, comment on, or appreciate, but will notice, comment on and appreciate when they aren't there."

BioWare's Mark Darrah reckons "polish is when everything comes together in a cohesive whole."

This is all from a Gamasutra article by J. Matthew Zoss. I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment early on in that article: "In a general sense, our group of developers defined a polished game as one that lacks issues that pull the player out of the gaming experience."

...

And really, you think it would take them long to implement the proposed change(s)? It's just resizing a canvas element in Unity and/or adding a small border in Photoshop. It's trivial. You could do it just before you ran out to grab lunch.

 

Assuming, of course, that the same person doesn't have ten equally trivial tasks that would demand an accordingly larger amount of time before lunch, or a single larger task of greater significance such that no time is available to add more despite how trivial.

Much needs doing. Few are doing it. These are important considerations, but not more important than many others not yet addressed. Eventually, hopefully, matters such of this will be the most pressing concern and it is then they should be tackled.

 

I see your point, however, strategically I think there is much to be said for more polish. To me it's the kind of low hanging fruit that enables more appeal/stickiness the more of it you do. And then slowly but surely, the bandwidth increases for much bigger things.

Maybe they can do Tweak-ass Tuesdays or something.