Hey everyone! This will be my first official post on here! Over the past month me and my team have been finalizing a big update to our game. Surprisingly one of the things that has left us most confused is what makes a good loading screen? We’ve scanned through many front page games and tried stuff ourselves. Yes, this may seem like a simple or even meaningless thing, but studies do show the first several seconds of something whether it be loading up a game or video, determine how engaged the audience will be for what follows, including their playtime and enjoyment.
Now, our issue is determining what a good loading screen is, we tried a logo popping up and slowly filling up with color, but it just was not satisfying. We tried an asset loading bar, that was not pretty either. Now we are wondering what you guys think a good loading screen would look like?
So far we think adding more poppy tweening effects will help, but ultimately it will come down to the layout of the screen.
So… we would love to hear what you all think a good loading screen would look like! (For context our game is about food, but you can be as general as you want with this.)
You can create an cinematic to give your player’s what the game is about. It is hard to stylize a front loading screen anyways. Borrowing some techniques to mobile games, there are usually some good non-in-game graphics with a loading bar having random filler text beneath.
I’ve always thought fractals or never-ending transitions that loop were pretty entertaining. If you could show the player something like that it’d be a nice way to help pass the time.
Well if it’s for Eating Simulator I suppose that the screen could be filled with food then a guy running back and forth eating it until uncovering the game screen.
Personally, I think a quick little clean and smooth loading screen with upbeat music leaving the player to anticipate and get excited for what’s next (which also helps load in stuff for a bit longer allowing them improved performance) will be great
Sometimes I play games on constrained bandwidth and it’s not that fast either, I had to wait multiple times to load absolutely every asset the game had, I only saw a background ui with nothing on it, because the last assets were the loading ui ones, for example logo, just to fill my disk space or memory and yet no playtime. One game even played an animation with multiple images instead of a spritesheet, or just a simple tween. Also bear that some devices may not play well with everything you’re requesting to cache, causing slowdown or wasting a mobile user’s 4G.
Only use a loading screen to load the necessary assets to have a bare gameplay, such as the main menu buttons, or the region the player is most likely to see just after the loading screen, such as a spawn. Thankfully for Preload to be deprecated as it caused many developers to load assets sequentially instead of concurrently, which can be done with the new PreloadAsync. Also mind that roblox already has a loading screen, something that users agree and expect, which takes a lot of time already and your loading screen for the minimal assets may not be necessary and may not have as much benefits as it’s maintenance.
If you can distract the player from the fact that it’s actually loading, you’ve succeeded. Otherwise, a useful tip is to actually let them know what’s loading.
As @ScriptOn mentioned, interesting transitions are cool. And as @Intended_Pun said, no loading screen is great. You definitely want to minimize the loading time as much as possible, but keep it entertaining to the player.
Simply showing a “Loading…” text with a spinner is really boring.
One thing I did in a game I’m making right now is to merge the loading sequence into the actual physical world & with the theme of the game. So when the game is loading, it shows some pretty graphics, but then the menu quickly swoops in in a seamless transition. It’s quick, smooth, and themed.
If you can include the theme of your game within the loading scene, that’s a huge plus. For instance, if you have a racing game, it would be awesome to somehow incorporate a car racing around in the loading sequence.
Something that can give a moment of entertainment to the player waiting for the game to load. Like a cool effect, some funny facts/joke and some good music along with it.
The loading screen is actually a great place to add little bits of advice/tutorial. Many games do this as there is no reason not to — it’s empty space anyways.
Another thing I’ve seen is a little minigame on the loading screen in one of the epic battle fantasy games (3 or 4).
I always recommend letting players have interaction when the game is loading, for example. There’s a website called glitch that is for developers. When someone is looking at a project, it will start the project and meanwhile the user can draw stuff on it. Which of course, makes the loading period less boring.
Possibly making each letter of the game tween upwards into a position one by one. Then at the right corner you just have a smaller circle loader. This way the player has something to look at while they are waiting, which hopefully doesn’t take long. The letters could always have a back glow while the loading continues or even restart the upward spring tween.
Somebody already has said this, try avoiding loading screens as much as you can. After I did some analyzing, loading screens in Roblox just don’t do well. If you look at well thought out games like for example Vesteria, it’s an amazingly developed game but it is just not really made to target the majority audience on Roblox, which consists of mainly young children. Children usually don’t have a big attention span, which in return makes them want things that get straight to the point, for example Jailbreak, you load in to the game, pick a team and jump right into the game. Most of the front page games are simple, get straight to the point, and those 2 things along with other things make players hooked on them, which causes them to come back every day. As to your project, good luck on it!
I’d recommend you start with a basic loading screen, you can learn how to at Alvin’s channel.
After you get more popular and better at GUI’s and scripting, you should go for professional ones.
Example:
Welcome to [Game Name] by [Owner’s Name]!
Here are the options:
Play Game
Settings
Info
Help
Play Game:
Loads the game, and destroys the GUI after loading has finished.
Settings:
Change your experience in the game, such as make the sky red on your screen!
Info:
Find out more about our game!
Help:
Need help? Contact a member of staff! [website link]
Loading Screen:
Connecting and loading the game, please do not leave game or turn off your device while we load your data and the game.
Finish Loading Screen:
Loaded! Please wait as the GUI goes off your screen.
Tip: Find free models and mess and edit around with them to learn how to make GUI’s.
Since this is the loading screen, and I’m not sure if you are talking about loading game or after reset or rejoining loading GUI, I might edit if you give more info on if it’s a:
After Reset Loading GUI
Rejoining Loading GUI
Normal Loading GUI.
