Concept Art: Magic Selection
This blog will be looking at some of the early stage concept art and low fidelity wireframes of some of the systems within our VR project. Above are some images of a few designs I had drawn up for our most used and most important system within our project, This being the magic select system. As previously discussed in some blogs, I had constrained myself to create a fully diegetic UI throughout our project, So this brought on a whole host of possibilities when it came to designing this system, I could be really creative with how the system worked and I wanted to try and push myself to make something unique for our project.
So the first thing to do was to sketch out some rough ideas to show to the team and get feedback and do some research into similar VR titles and look at how exactly they deal with UI in their titles. The first game I knew to look at was "Blade and Sorcery" as it is a very well know and successful game within VR that follows the same genre as our own project. Blade and sorcery use a diegetic menu for their magic selection and I wanted to draw some inspiration from their use of it while keeping it original to our project.
I decided then to start sketching out two ideas for how the system might work and look. I chose to create a more out there design that we would try to tackle first and also a backup design that was far more simplistic in design simply so that when it came to programming and implementation of the more complex design, if that proved to be too difficult we had something easier to fall back on so that we wouldn't get stuck in development. Both Designs are seen above (Main Design - Right / Backup Design - Left).
While I was drawing inspiration from "Blade and Sorcery" I wanted to do our selection mechanic drastically differently from anything I had seen in VR up until this point, so I sat down the team and we brainstormed some ideas for what we thought could be interesting ideas for the selection system. This discussion then lead us to a point where we didnt know exactly how the system would work but we needed to create something where the player could easily access their powers quickly and most of all they could see what powers they had selected without having to go through menus, or have non diegetic elements appear on screen.
With that information then I went off to come up with some concepts and landed on the idea of an "omnitrix" like system where the player could select their powers through a power wheel that was imbedded directly on their hands. This would allow the player to select their abilities without having to being up any sort of menu.
The more simplistic design drew some inspiration from dishonoured where the player would simply press a button to cycle through their powers and the symbol/tattoo on the players hand would change colour and have some particle effects to show off exactly what power is currently in use by the player.
Concept Art: Health bars
While working on a magic system I was also thinking about other UI elements that could possibly be placed into a similar space as I wanted for all of the key information that the player would need to have have access too to be available at the "flick of a wrist", quite literally in fact as one of the first things that I had looked into designing was how the player would view their own health during gameplay.
The idea of a bracelet was something that after some initial sketches I thought could work quite well, and so I drew up multiple versions of what the health bar could look like (Seen above) I tried to make very different versions each time I created a new design, Ranging from simplistic to more complex, I also experimented with the actual shape of the health bar, in having a very stereotypical at first but then branched out and designed a circular bar just to see what could work.
These designs were then taken to the team and we sat down and I showed them each design and we discussed what we thought would work best for our project. After some consideration we decided that a very stereotypical progress bar would work the best as it was considered by the team to be something that we believed would be the most legible for the player in VR.
Concept Art: Menus
One of the most challenging areas to design was most definitely the menu system in which the player would interact with, simply due to the constraint that I had placed on myself in having a fully diegetic UI throughout the whole project.
However I had again drawn inspiration from another VR title, that being "Gorn". In Gorn they have a full level in which the player can move around to start the game choose options etc. This is what I had hoped that our projects menu system could be like. To be honest at first I really struggled with coming up with a design that suited our game that I thought was feasible for the team to create. As at this stage in time developing for VR is something that is new to the team as a whole.
For each menu type I had wanted there to be physical interactions that the player had to perform to control the player settings such as pushing toggle-able buttons, using sliders to select sound effect volume. (As seen above) The low fidelity wireframes show how I want these menus to look and function in game.
In doing research for developing this kind of UI for VR I found a few very handy resources that would allow the team to more easily implement this diegetic menu that I had wanted to push the team towards. These being resources coming from the "VR Expansion Plugin"
VR Expansion Plugin:
This piece of kit I had found through recommendations on the unreal forums. It was a plugin that could be added to any VR project through GitHub and provided its users with a number of pre set buttons, levers, dials etc. That worked via player input, e.g. players could pull a lever and a menu screen could come down. This made the idea of creating a fully diegetic menu much more feasible to put together.
Both Myself and Josh Davidson spent a good portion of the beginning of development reading up on the documentation and trying to get a better understanding of the plugin as a whole before we added it into our project so that when the time came to actually add it in we would fully understand the process of how it would work. At first we were also hesitant to add it to the project as we felt that it might be considered unfair to essentially skip the process of making this ourselves, However, when we sat down with the team and also a few of our lecturers and discussed whether it would be considered ok to add something like this in, and after some discussion we did decide to add it into the project.
We would only be using a few of the elements provided from the plugin such as the VR Buttons and Levers. This would save so much time during development as we wouldn't have to try and figure out a way to create these types of player interaction.
Concept Art: Weapons
Above is the image I had drawn up of the players main weapon, I had drawn up two variants of what the sword could potentially look like, I had looked at a few different references for what I was looking for in terms of having a main player weapon, I tried to make a really distinct silhouette so that the player could play with a really unique distinct weapon.
When first making the concepts I wanted to create a shorter weapon as well as a longer weapon to experiment with different types and While I liked both weapons it was hard to shake the feeling that the shorter weapon had a much more distinct silhouette. When I brought the concepts and presented them to the team they also agreed in that they really liked the overall uniqueness of the short sword when compared to the broadsword.
Concept Art: Detailed Main Menu + Interactable Buttons
The Images above are what came after we had decided to go ahead with using the VR expansion project, I wanted to try and give the team a better idea of how I was envisioning the main menu to look. So the above concept image was my first draft at trying to portray what I was thinking. I wanted the environment to be a nature-esque scene where the player would load in and in front of them would be the start button that they could walk up to and start the game, and then the options and exit would be accessible within this environment as well.
The image seen above was my attempt at experimenting with creating a unique looking interactable button that would be reused throughout our project for interactions with puzzles etc. Again similarly to the sword concepts I was trying to create a unique silhouette that was instantly recognisable to the player and instantly as soon as they seen it they would recognise that it was something that they could interact with.
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