The interface is the heart and soul of a video game: it is the integral piece that allows a player to interact with the game. In order to create a great interface, you must carefully plan every detail. "Game Interface Design" helps you outline each step and define the goals for your interface. It covers the interface from the first image that appears onscreen to the information displayed during game-play. You?ll cover basic design and art principles, explore the world of interface buttons as you learn how to create your own functioning button, and find out how to substitute images and icons for onscreen text. You?ll also learn how to incorporate animation and use Flash to create an amazing, interactive interface. Along the way, you?ll get a glimpse into the video game industry, including developer and publisher relationships, schedules, budget constraints, and politics of the industry.

Disappointing...

As a game designer and art director, I was hoping to get some insight into the psychology of designing user interface for optimum usability and effectiveness. Instead, I got tutorials for optimizing web graphics in Photoshop. This book is strictly and completely for beginners, another collection of tutorials aimed at capitalizing on the market of aspiring designers that would like to make games, if only they knew how to code and draw. And, as usual, the book falls short even for them. It should go without saying that if you can write the code for a whole game in Flash, you don’t need someone to teach you how to write the code for a button. Fox, however, devotes several pages to coding a simple button in Flash.

There is some professional insight in the book- i.e. making more important buttons stand out by increasing their size or their contrast in color value- but even that is all more or less common sense. Skipping past pages and pages of introductory photoshop tutorials just to learn that players don’t like to read text in video games feels like a waste of time, and a waste of money.

To be honest, I can’t think of anyone that would benefit from all the information in this book. Even someone who’s never used Flash before would be better off learning from Adobe’s built-in tutorials.