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Zoya Street
Home   >   Game Design   >   Game patterns: UI inspiration for mobile games

Game patterns: UI inspiration for mobile games

By on February 25, 2014
FlickrCC William Hook

Adam Siton got in touch to tell me about his new site, game-patterns.com. It’s a collection of UI design examples from mobile games that I think you might find useful. His introduction to the project is cross-posted below, and I’ve highlighted some interesting examples at the end.

[Last week] I released my first game (Brain Maze) to the app store […]

Being a newbie in game development, when I was working on the game I searched for a UI inspiration site to help me design different parts of the game (especially the level selection screen and the in-app purchases store screen).
I really like UI inspiration sites. There are dozens of them and I use them a lot to get design ideas for my app (my favorites are Inspired-UIand pttrns.

To my surprise, I found out that there was not a single UI inspiration site targeting mobile games – so naturally I decided to build one.

The site is called game-patterns.com and me and a good friend of mine, Eldad (A.K.A Dutzi) launched the site [last week].

I think this is going to be a very valuable resource for game developers, and I’ll love to hear what you think about it.

game-patterns.com is a collection of screenshots from top mobile games, categorised by the kind of content each screen displays. Here are some examples:

loading screens

The loading screens page shows how some developers have used the screen space during a wait time to amuse players and advertise IAPs. Others have chosen to keep their loading screen minimalistic.

level complete screens

The level complete page is a treasure trove of graphical pizzazz (not polish) celebrating the player’s success and generating excitement.

store screens

It’s always worth thinking about how to improve your merchandising, and this collection of store pages contains a lot of techniques to analyse, emulate and test.

About Zoya Street

I’m responsible for all written content on the site. As a freelance journalist and historian, I write widely on how game design and development have changed in the past, how they will change in the future, and how that relates to society and culture as a whole. I’m working on a crowdfunded book about the Dreamcast, in which I treat three of the game-worlds it hosted as historical places. I also write at Pocketgamer.biz and The Borderhouse.