[Starlight] an excuse to talk about her latest obsession (Patreon)

the above screenshot should look pretty familiar. look for the timing. well, i probably should've left one normal to show the contrast-- but i didn't. anyway, i added an input cancel so that players don't have to wait the full two seconds for the between-turns thing to play. i know how impatient y'all are. and you should be. 

this is part of something i've started thinking about just in the past week or so, the UX of a game. this is probably a newer term-- or at least it's new to me, but i rather like it. i mentioned last week that I was probably going to take some inspiration from Persona 5's UI, and I have, but the UX is probably more important. p5 handles both famously. 

so what are these abbreviations? UI is a classic that I assume most people know-- User Interface. It's how the menus, screen lay out, and general flow of the game looks. UX seems to be gaining traction and popularity as a focus over that, which makes sense since, meaning User Experience, it refers to how the game feels to play. 

key elements of a UI: aesthetic, organized, easily readable, displays all necessary information for each screen as readily and in as little space as possible
key elements of the UX: responsive, fast, no lingering animations or load times, no need to scroll through lots of menus, player clearly understands at any given screen what they can do for what result

they're necessarily integrated, but they encompass different focuses. much of that already includes things i was thinking about before but this puts it in a clearer light, making it easier to talk about and consider. so i appreciate that. 

anyway, p5. strongly stylized UI, but it's made by the smoothness of its UX. everything is snappy, and there's only about two common animations in the entire game that you have to wait for (end of battle, and fusion) -- and those do feel bad. but it's just two out of the myriad. 

i think the battles are a pretty key success point for it. let's bring in some memes. 

this is the battle UI. you've probably seen it approximately all over the internet. compared to the things i mentioned before, it stacks up nicely: immediately responds to input, loads and unloads into actions very quickly, there's only one menu for skills, and everything we can do is presented right here for us

i will probably be using a similar input system for starlight when i get there. FE has too many menus. in the mean time, setting it up so we can cancel all our animations is a good first step.
and any pro league player could tell you how important that is anyway.