[Ep566] Game Devs Talk About Tooltips for 55 Minutes
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In this deep dive episode of Coffee with Butterscotch, indie game developers Seth, Adam, and Tim Ryan explore the surprisingly complex world of tooltips in game development. What appears to be a simple UI element—hover-over text that explains game mechanics—turns out to be a labyrinth of technical, design, and linguistic challenges. The hosts reveal that tooltips are not just about delivering information, but about creating a 'pull system' where players access details on demand, avoiding the overwhelming 'push system' of forced tutorials. They share their own struggles with consistency, clarity, and encoding special terms (like 'damage' or 'buffs') in a way that's both precise and visually distinct through color-coding. The real revelation comes when they expose how game engines fail to support basic text formatting—bold, color, line breaks—forcing developers to build custom systems from scratch. They detail the painstaking process of creating a custom markup language (similar to BBCode) to tag key terms, managing line breaks across languages, and handling dynamic scaling. Despite the immense effort, they emphasize that these 'invisible' improvements are crucial for player experience, even if they go unnoticed. The episode ends with a heartfelt plea: 'If you like the game, please leave a review saying the tooltips are great—because that’s where the real craftsmanship is.' The episode underscores a core truth in game development: the most impactful work often happens in the unseen, mundane details. The hosts reflect on how adding a new character feels exciting, but polishing tooltips—ensuring consistent terminology, proper color coding, and flawless line breaks—consumes far more time and mental energy. They compare this to the unappreciated design of a door handle: when it works, no one notices, but when it doesn’t, it creates constant friction. The takeaway is that true quality of life improvements are not flashy, but they are essential. By investing in these 'boring' problems, developers can create a game that feels polished, intuitive, and deeply satisfying—where every small detail contributes to a seamless, joyful experience.
Tooltips are a 'pull system' that lets players access information on demand, avoiding the overwhelming 'push system' of forced tutorials.
Consistency and precision in language are critical—terms like 'damage' or 'buff' must be defined and used uniformly to prevent player confusion.
Game engines lack built-in support for basic text formatting (bold, color, line breaks), forcing developers to build custom solutions from scratch.
Creating a custom markup system (like BBCode) to tag key terms for color-coding is essential but extremely time-consuming and error-prone.
Line breaking is a massive technical challenge, especially across languages with different rules (e.g., no spaces in Chinese, non-breaking spaces in numbers).
…and 3 more takeaways available in PodZeus
The Hidden Complexity of Tooltips
“Tooltips are super, super useful and super important for delivering that information because it allows you to do that. But making good tooltips is complicated.”
Clarity, Consistency, and the Power of Precision
“One of the things that we had to do with the demo was basically go through before we released it and revise every single tooltip for consistency.”
The Technical Nightmare: Text Formatting in Game Engines
“You have to find a way to as you render out each character at some point you need to tell the game engine, okay, I've written the first part of the sentence now stop here. And now change the text color to white.”
Building a Custom Markup System and Solving Line Breaks
“The solution to this problem is brute force, which is you just go, okay, I'm trying to draw this text at a scale of one in this box. We did our line breaks. Ah, shit. It's too tall. All right. Let's drop it down to 0.95 scale.”
The Philosophy of Invisible Craftsmanship
“It's the absence of any meaningful feedback. It's the absence of a problem. It's the game dev version of you're running a shop and people keep pulling on the door instead of pushing.”
“It's the absence of any meaningful feedback. It's the absence of a problem. It's the game dev version of you're running a shop and people keep pulling on the door instead of pushing.”
“You have to find a way to as you render out each character at some point you need to tell the game engine, okay, I've written the first part of the sentence now stop here. And now change the text color to white.”
“Tooltips are super, super useful and super important for delivering that information because it allows you to do that. But making good tooltips is complicated.”
Hosts
Seth
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Adam Swellanius
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Tim Ryan
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