Post-Mortem on UI/UX Design for Switch Port of Grindstone
At the launch of the Nintendo Switch version, the Grindstone team wanted to take some time and talk through some of the UI and layout redesigns the team made to optimize the experience and the flow for console.
We wanted to talk for a bit here about one of the areas we focused a lot on improving ahead of the Switch launch: the Interface!
Lots of players who enjoyed Grindstone on Apple Arcade know the game’s phone-friendly “portrait” layout well. But Grindstone has always been playable in widescreen, for Apple Arcade subscribers playing on Mac or AppleTV.
It looked like this in 2019:
To be honest, we felt the old widescreen mode left a lot to be desired. To make the game feel truly at home on the Switch, we decided to go back to the drawing board and reconsider the main battle UI.
Early on, we experimented with revised UI layouts by hacking together existing art assets. The version below is one of the closest to what we’d end up shipping. The main reasons? For one, it makes the gameplay area a lot larger & also, it puts on-screen buttons in thumb range!
This is one of the cool things about the Switch version — you can mix and match between controls and touch whenever freely Sticks, swipes, or d-pad; whatever/whenever! This also means Grindstone is the rare Switch game you can play undocked without joycons!
The puzzle/battle screen got the most obvious UI overhaul, but the overworld view got some major changes + feature upgrades, too! First off, here’s a look at the 2019 version of this screen:
Compared to the 2020 version, which has:
- Embiggened main visuals
- UI elements resized by importance
- Map scroll on sidebar The Map Scroll was added to help players navigate a growing world — we nearly doubled the level count in 2020!
Wider screens also gave us the opportunity to design UIs that are able to accommodate more information comfortably. The expanded leaderboards, for example, allow you to see what other players did in their runs.
These are the kinds of design challenges and solutions that have made bringing Grindstone to Nintendo Switch so much fun for us. We really hope you enjoy playing it half as much as we did making it!
