R34 Airship Project - Week 6 - Experimenting With UI

This week I started looking at UI, the different methods I could use to show the player information and the best way for the player to interact with the UI. There were 2 types of UI that I wanted to try out, the first is some big buttons and images anchored in world space and a UI that is attached to the player hand which they can touch to control.

Anchored UI

The benefit of the anchored UI would be that it will always be there waiting for the player to interact with it, and will be easily spotted when simply looking around in the world. I also wouldn't need to worry too much about how much space I have because as long as it is easily visible (text is big enough to read) and the buttons are large enough to interact with, there is a lot of room to either have larger buttons, more buttons, or just buttons that are more spaced out, making them look less cluttered, improving the user experience.

The downside of this, however, is that the player will have to be facing in a specific direction in order to use this UI, which isn't that big a problem, but its something to take into consideration. Having the UI in 1 3D point in the world, I will need to implement some form of raycasting based interaction, this is because if I do not, it may be hard or even impossible for the player to interact with the buttons, possibly even if they get out of their chair.

Hand Based UI

The benefit of a hand based UI would be that no matter where the player is looking, they are able to bring up their hand and see the menu. this is good because the player won't be forced to look at one direction while playing. this can give us more freedom to create a story around the player rather than just in front of them. I personally think it's also got a lot more wow factor than an anchored UI, which could be good and bad, the user would remember the experience afterwards, but it may distract them from the story element that we plan to have in the game.

The hand-based UI has a lot more downsides than the anchored UI, it can be confusing to people if they're not aware that looking at/opening your hand brings up the UI. Another problem is that there isn't much space for many buttons here, because they all have to centre around the hand adding too many would make it very hard to interact with.

What will I be using?

For this project, I have decided that I will make the UI Anchored in the world, this is because it allows for a lot more freedom in creating the UI as well as user-friendliness. It will also be easy enough to put in the world without it being too distracting.