Masahiro Sakurai is back with another installment in his game development video series. This time around, he’s shared a video that fits into the ‘UI’ category, where he dives into details about the sizes of icons in the UI. Sakurai’s games are similar when it comes to how he designs the UI, specifically, you’ll realize that he always puts different sizes for the icons based on how important that icon is in the game.

About znbashi

znbashi

Just someone who spent most of his childhood playing Smash Bros with my brother, which led me to explore more games. Favorite franchises include Xenoblade and Kirby.

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Comments (3)

the_crimson_lure

8M ago

I'm sure there are fans out there as well, but I have always hated these types of menus in Sakurai's games.

It makes sense on paper but is too disorienting to internalize.
When a game has a list of options, and sublists under them, it's easy to internalize them as a tree structure in my brain and remember where everything is.

With these crazy icons haphazardly placed up, down, left, right, sometimes diagonally, a small round button in the corner and a big half-pill shaped one slightly left of center, only to go into a subtree where positioning, size, shape, and colors are another completely different layout, it's incredibly difficult to internalize where everything is.

Again, it sounds super intuitive on paper but in practice has never appealed to me as a player.

Edited 1 time

vinlauria

8M ago

Ah, the famous Sakurai Menus.

How I love them in all their clean, iconographical vector glory.


conangiga

8M ago

Sakurai talking about clean menus is like politicians talking about...politics if we're honest. They both basically wing it.