Touhou 6: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil & Nuclear Throne heuristic analysis¶
Which heuristics used in these two games can positively influence our game?¶
Touhou 6 is an old game and is meant for hardcore players and Nielsen Norman’s usability heuristics are barely used, except for one: “Visibility of system status”.
How do these games display information in a non invasive way?¶
Touhou 6’s side panel¶
In Touhou 6, all relevant information is displayed on the screen at all times. Score, power, graze, player lives… Additionally, this information is displayed on the side of the screen, separately from the game view, so it does not hide anything in the game view.
The game also has plenty of feedback for important actions, from the player flashing when taking damage, to the tiny white text when collecting power ups.
A side panel is a simple solution with its drawbacks (mainly the screen space it takes), but sometimes it is all you need. However, if the screen space is not as abundant, Nuclear Throne provides a better solution.
Nuclear Throne’s corner HUD¶
Nuclear Throne has all the information displayed at the top left of the screen. This means some things in this area can be obstructed (this portion of the HUD is quite large) but it also means the player potentially needs only a quick glance to get an idea of what resources they have. I say potentially, because the game makes quite the heavy use of text in its HUD, making it take longer to read.
Feedback wise, there is always some feedback when needed, but not always present in the right place and form. Since the player will mostly want to look at… the player, they may not immediately notice their health going down when getting hit.
However, Nuclear Throne did a better job with controls and the “Consistency and standards” heuristic.
How do these games use standards for their controls?¶
To move in Nuclear Throne, the player can use WASD, the arrow keys or the numpad, all of which are very common. In general, the player has access to a lot of control options to perform a certain action. Each action usually has at least one binding that is commonly used in other games.
In Touhou 6, the game the game uses arrow keys to move. For the rest of the controls, it uses shift for slowing down the player and allowing precise movement, which makes sense since it is a modifier key. Shooting and using bombs are mapped to the z and x keys respectively. These keys are very commonly used as the primary buttons in games that do not use mouse controls.
Now let’s talk about the bad or non-use of heuristics in these games.
How could these games use more heuristics to improve the user experience?¶
First off “Match between system and the real world”: Touhou does a very bad job at using real world objects to make the game easier to understand. Collectible object in the game are usually boxes with a letter or a kanji (japanese ideogram such as 点 meaning “point”). While these have become part of the charm of the game, they make getting into the game difficult without prior knowledge. This is especially problematic for a casual game. Bombs could be bombs or lives could be hearts for example. Nuclear Throne does a better job at this, using real weapons and ammo for weapons and ammo for example.
Secondly, Touhou 6 never tells you how to play the game. There could be a reminder of the controls on the side screen for instance. This would improve the “Recognition rather than recall” part of the game. Nuclear Throne does have context dependent input with a prompt to remind you how to interact with some objects (like chests).
Conclusion¶
So how can we get out of the heuristics of these games? Their way of conveying a lot of information at once can be useful. They use very conventional input bindings as well, which we can do as well.