AAA gamedev here. I agree in principle with the gamefeel critiques, but I’d like to bring up that scale absolutely matters here. You should know as a guy who works in the space that every degree of complexity your codebase adds can cause cascading issues, which is one of the million reasons indie devs are told to keep their game scope small.
irmoz@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Scale absolutely matters, but the scale of the new game screen is (or should be) very minor compared to the game itself. That one scene should only be setting the variables for new play, not interacting with anything outside of it.
And, to be clear, the main concern is simply the input handling in that scene. The UI itself doesn’t really need to be changed, just which buttons change the highlight focus.
I can imagine it was likely thrown together quickly, perhaps with some unnecessary coupling, or maybe reading the inputs using action names that also relate to gameplay, so it becomes awkward changing it out.
I’m not so experienced with Unity, but in UE and Godot, adding and mapping inputs is fairly trivial - select the “up” button and map it to “ui_focus_up”, etc. I can’t see it being much more complex in Unity.