The Final pieces of UX/UI Work
At this stage in development my role as a UX and UI designer has nearly been fulfilled, not to say that there is no more work to do for this discipline however, there is not enough left to do to justify staying exclusively a UX/UI designer.
To help out the team my role is now going to switch from being a UX/UI designer to being more of a generalist role, I will be picking up work where I can weather that be in Level Design, Asset Development or Game Design/Programming. Ill be wearing a few different hats from now on in development but before I can start into that I had to finish up the last few UI and UX tasks.
The Shield Mechanic
With the introduction of our new enemy the Goblin (Above) the game was really starting to come together. Holly Boyle one of our programmers had developed the A.I for this enemy and included a ranged "spit attack" this attack however during playtesting while manageable in small groups, When multiple of the goblins were all attacking at once it could become too much to deal with. So we needed to come up with a solution.
The obvious idea would be to add in a shield that you could pick up, however I had a random thought that our current selection wheel for the magic system already looked like a shield, having a shield shape. So I sketched up a design in adobe XD for what this could look like the above images were how it turned out.
I had a few constraints that I needed to add to the design to make sure that it was a great player experience to use, the first of which is that the player has to rotate the handle in the middle of the circle 90 degrees to unlock the shield, You would then have to pull the shield towards yourself after unlocking. I put this in place so that a player couldn't accidentally choose the shield while they were selecting magic.
The second constraint was that the crystals from the menu selection would stay on the shield even after it has been activated, this way the player could have the choice to have a shield and magic or just quickly select magic without having to open up another menu. As it would be annoying to a player to have to open a menu after having opened an already existing menu.
The last constraint was that the shield should wear down over time, and would eventually break, this was so that the player had to strategize when was the best time to use it, above is the UI that I had designed in photoshop in four distinct phases where they progressively get more and more broken until eventually breaking fully.
After all of this was brought to the team, both Holly and Josh quickly got to work bringing it to life. They did a fantastic job bring the wireframes into the project and we were all chuffed with how it turned out.
Tutorial UI Images
(A small selection of gifs made in procreate for tutorials)
We wanted to teach the player how certain mechanics worked in game via in game gifs that detail the actions that the player has to take to complete said action. I had made these images in procreate taking heavy inspiration from Gorn where they also teach the player controls through images that are scattered throughout the game.
Again this ties back into the fully diegetic UI that we were sticking to and allows the player to fully understand and have a visual reference for how to complete a mechanic.
Lastly then I had worked on creating an image containing the players controls that can be viewed from the main menu.
Moving Forward
As I briefly mentioned at the beginning of this blog, as of this stage in development I will be picking up a generalist role so that I can keep my workload steady throughout this last part of development.
I need to be able to help out the team in any way I can as I personally feel like Karl has a lot of work to take on by himself at this point. So I will be primarily dedicating my time to creating more assets for the team to use so as to relieve some stress from Karl. I also know that I want to dip my toes back into programming, and while I wont be doing anything as complex as what our programmers Josh and Holly have produced up until this state. I want to be able to help them out where possible by creating prototypes for mechanics that I design and then hand them off to the programming team and allow them to work off of my foundation and improve what I have made. I will still be working on UI and UX issues that occur within the project, too.
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