If you’re spending months on your menu system, you’re doing something wrong. Bang it out in a few days and revisit just prior to launch. It’s really important because it’s the first thing players use, but it can also be overhauled late in development because it doesn’t impact much.
I would understand if it was a complex in-game menu system for a grand strategy or 4x game or something, not for a game launch menu. Get your UX team to iterate a bit during development and have devs throw it together once the major features are ready and it’s mostly time for bug fixing and polish.
This is simply not feasible - menus include pause menus, talent trees, inventories, all that kind of stuff. All of that is necessary for proper gameplay testing. You can’t just “bang that out in a few days”.
I’m sorry, but this idea that any of this is easy enough to do in a few days and not crucial enough to iterate on throughout development instead of just doing it at the end, is exactly the kind of naive attitude that the Helldivers and Palworld devs are talking about.
menus include pause menus, talent trees, inventories, all that kind of stuf
Right, which is why I specifically said there’s an exception for menu-heavy games like 4x and grand strategy. If we’re mostly talking about launch and pause menus (which was my intent), that’s a small scope of work, as in weeks, not months.
You can absolutely build that in a few days, and then redo it later once UX has decided what needs to go there. It’s pretty similar game to game, so build it properly once to be data driven, and then tweak the UX and options a bit for each game. Optimization is generally done pretty late in the dev cycle, so those options don’t need to exist until later in development anyway, and that’s like half the work.
The important thing is to have your UX team iterate on it before your devs get involved, so it’s ready. And have them build it out while optimizing things for release. Your menu systems don’t need a ton of testing relative to the actual mechanics and gameplay.
If you’re spending months on your menu system, you’re doing something wrong. Bang it out in a few days and revisit just prior to launch. It’s really important because it’s the first thing players use, but it can also be overhauled late in development because it doesn’t impact much.
I would understand if it was a complex in-game menu system for a grand strategy or 4x game or something, not for a game launch menu. Get your UX team to iterate a bit during development and have devs throw it together once the major features are ready and it’s mostly time for bug fixing and polish.
This is simply not feasible - menus include pause menus, talent trees, inventories, all that kind of stuff. All of that is necessary for proper gameplay testing. You can’t just “bang that out in a few days”.
I’m sorry, but this idea that any of this is easy enough to do in a few days and not crucial enough to iterate on throughout development instead of just doing it at the end, is exactly the kind of naive attitude that the Helldivers and Palworld devs are talking about.
Right, which is why I specifically said there’s an exception for menu-heavy games like 4x and grand strategy. If we’re mostly talking about launch and pause menus (which was my intent), that’s a small scope of work, as in weeks, not months.
You can absolutely build that in a few days, and then redo it later once UX has decided what needs to go there. It’s pretty similar game to game, so build it properly once to be data driven, and then tweak the UX and options a bit for each game. Optimization is generally done pretty late in the dev cycle, so those options don’t need to exist until later in development anyway, and that’s like half the work.
The important thing is to have your UX team iterate on it before your devs get involved, so it’s ready. And have them build it out while optimizing things for release. Your menu systems don’t need a ton of testing relative to the actual mechanics and gameplay.