UX/UI improvements to a player’s quality of life on Animal Crossing New Horizon
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Animal Crossing New Horizon (ACNH) is one of my most anticipated games to play in 2020. It’s been a great companion during the COVID-19 lockdown, but after around 30hrs of playtime over the past three weeks, I have one unshakeable feeling:
This game feels unnecessarily “grind-y”.
I believe there is a fine line between playing a game that feels like a grind, and one that helps the player establish a routine. In my experience so far, ACNH has been more of the former.
I’d like to give a high-level overview of three areas that caused me consistent frustration over the past few weeks and talk about how these pain points can be solved.
This is where I input my caveat, I have never worked on a game before, honestly, I’m not even sure how a game is made. So I am writing these “improvements” with very little understanding of the constraints the development team at Nintendo/NDcube went through, so suggestions are made based solely on my personal assumptions and my peers’ playing experience (As well as community feedback from r/AnimalCrossing).
Inventory Management
While there are no awards for best in-game inventory design (not that I know of…), a badly designed inventory can break a player’s flow. (Great article by Jenova Chan on flow in games)
In ACNH, the player’s inventory is a storage space with a fixed item limit which players upgrade as they progress. On multiple occasions, I found myself staring intensely at my hot-mess of an inventory, looking for the one item I wanted to sell. It was infuriating when I find out I’ve missed something, and need to run back to the shop.
In ACNH, players have only one limited and hidden way to perform a sort function: by holding down the ‘A’ button, selecting and dragging the items, ONE BY ONE, like so:
Taking the existing pattern that is already in the game, I re-designed the inventory to perform ‘sort’ like the following, — press Y to Sort. It follows how the “Sort” function works in the game’s home storage, and crafting system.
Sort options include — By Alphabetical, type and order obtained. This allows players to organise their inventory with ease, alleviating the pain when players need to perform activities such as buying/selling and gifting.
Tools Durability Indicator
One of the ways ACNH sets itself apart from the previous titles in the Animal Crossing series is in how it handles tools. Every tool in the game now has a finite life span and breaks after a certain number of usage. This teaches the player to be more resourceful, and considerate about the usage of tools.
However, in ACNH, there is no obvious signs/indication of when a tool might break. The introduction to a durability indicator in the game’s coming updates would save players from countless upsetting moments.
As we step in uncharted UI territory for the AC series, I took inspirations from games like Minecraft, Legend of Zelda Breath Of The Wild to design a different way ACNH can introduce durability indicator:
After designing the initial concept, although informative, I felt like an HP health indicator was not the most suitable interface for tools in ACNH. The design, especially in the player’s inventory feels out of place and foreign to the series’ art direction. A more familiar pattern in Animal Crossing series is the changing state of objects. For example, how turnips change from a healthy to rotten state.
I believe this may be an alternative solution to inform the player of tool durability. Using the vaulting pole as an example, over time with usage, the tool would go from brand new to breaking state. Following this pattern, wooden tools would show signs of snapping, and metal tools show signs of rust.
Perhaps this pattern doesn’t provide the player as much accuracy, but I believe is more suitable for the AC series’ look and feel. But, this would mean the game will have to create, and maintain a much bigger library of tool designs.
Crafting Experience
I believe this topic will resonate with most ACNH players. Much like the sorting mentioned above, a player can only craft each item, one by one, despite having the ingredients to craft multiple. This leads to a lot clicking through repetitive, time-wasting interaction/dialogue.
Without dissecting the game’s crafting system, below is an illustration of what crafting multiple items could look like by introducing a quantity selector.
The players will only arrive at the quantity selector screen (right) if they have enough resources to craft multiple items, otherwise, the player will enter into crafting animation from the previous screen after hitting “Craft it!” button.
Introducing a quantity selector like this will have a big impact on the player’s quality of life by creating time and effort saving value throughout the whole lifecycle of the player’s experience.
These designs are early concepts, none of them has been tested. Creating a new flow will require more player testing, with different items in the game and more scenarios/use cases.
By no means do I think these design changes are simple to implement, neither do I know the original intentions behind some of these decisions, but I believe changes like these will help players establish a routine by making key activities much easier and intuitive to perform, thus reduce the “grindiness” feel of the game.
