There are many elements of a video game that need to “pop” to be recognized by players for how good it is. Sure, sometimes games go for the “basic looks” for certain elements so that they can “focus on what really matters,” but some teams don’t want to skimp on anything. Take, for example, the “User Interface,” or UI. This is what players interact with to get around certain menus or activate certain actions by their players. Most games have a UI, and it needs to look good and be usable. Roblox has decided to up its UI game via a new “styling” feature that has just gone to beta.
This was revealed on a new blog by the dev team, where creator parties can now showcase much more stylized UIs to their players to make the game more fun:
“Today, we’re excited to introduce UI Styling as a Studio beta! UI styling is a Roblox-native feature that lets you declare and globally apply overrides to UI instance properties. This has been a long awaited feature with lots of anticipation from the community – we can’t wait to hear what you think and see what you build.”
If you’re unsure of why this is such a special thing, the team broke that down, too:
“In the past, visually styling UI elements typically involved manually adjusting the properties of each individual UI instance. In an experience with numerous UI elements, this process could quickly become cumbersome – having to search through the Datamodel tree to locate the right instance, match its properties exactly to another, and repeat the process for each one.
Styling separates defining the structure of UI elements from their visual appearance. This is extremely powerful – teams can now iterate quickly across color palettes, fonts, and other themes without recreating instances.”
In other words, this will make it easier to do special visuals with your user interface screens without having to search through mountains of code to get things done. It’s simpler this way. Granted, the team does expect to fix some bugs along the way, but that’s par for the course with something like this. That’s why it’s in beta, after all.
This is just the latest of several changes that the dev team has been making recently to try and improve the overall creator experience. These changes might feel small, but they can have a big impact on how certain creator games look, play, and feel. So, if you’ve been hoping to improve your titles UI, this might be the thing to help with that!
