This weeks blog will be focusing on the research I have carried out during the week, some experimentation and concepts of possible UI ideas as well as the development of some prototypes of the UI Elements that I had research and concepted.
Research & Planning
When it came to planning out the UI elements within our game I realised that I wanted to push myself to really try and create UI that would take full advantage of the user being in VR and from my research I knew that the way to do that would be through the use of diegetic UI elements.
This particular sub-category of UI has already seen a lot of use throughout VR games and experiences (Blade and Sorcery, Gorn & Robo Recall) to name a few and research has shown that UI in VR is one of the most important things a UX/UI designer must get right, otherwise it can break immersion very easily which is extremely important to creating a great user experience within VR. This is what made me want to push myself towards somehow making the vast majority of our UI in game Diegetic
Where did my Research Take me to?
As a team we have been keeping links to useful articles that we find throughout the weeks and we have been posting them on our Miro Board. This has been a really useful way of keeping track of who's research is where but also it has been a great way to organise our research so that if we need to back up any decisions we have made we can just refer to this library of links.
I'm just going to go over some of the articles I went through during research this week so I can give a better understanding of where my reasoning behind my UX/UI descisions have came from.
First we have a UX article by "Prashanth Shanmugam" a UX designer that goes on to cover some key points people have to consider when designing for a product that dosen't rely on a traditional "screen"
I have highlighted a portion of the text that reads "Achieving the best user experience in VR Devices is the key to the success for the entire concept" I took this particular quote as that keeping a user immersed within VR and the world you have created in it, Is what can make or break a VR product. This then lead me to ask the question of "Well what is it that makes a user immersed?"
I then found a great article discussing the topic of Diegetic UI experiences within VR by Nicole W on the UX collective Website, In this article she discusses about how Diegetic UI started out within the early stages of VR and shows off how to properly implement it within a VR title while giving examples of Diegetic UI within the norm of game development.
The words highlighted above are the sole words that solidified for me that for me to fulfil my role as a great UI/UX designer for this project, I need to push myself to think outside the box of a traditional UI and create an immersive and believable experience while still being practical and useable by the player. So it was time to get to concepting out some ideas for how I was going to do this.
Conceptualising Designs and Experimentation
When it came to creating concepts for diegetic UI I wanted to tackle some of the elements that I would know the player would be using the most throughout their time in the game world/ environment. So the first thing I tackled was the players health bar.
I wanted to really try to implement the health bar in a way that seemed intuitive to use for our specific needs within this project so I looked for inspiration in other similar VR games and came across "Blade and Sorcery" I seen how they implemented their Health and Mana system by laying them flat on the players wrist.
This idea seemed like it would work well as a diegetic UI element within our game so I decided to draw up some concepts (Seen Above) of how the Health bar might look on the players wrist as well as drawing up some variations on how it could look.
Overall though after some team feedback over Discord as well as looking at them together in person we decided as a team to go with thee more traditional "Bar" shape as I believed that it would be the simplest for the user to understand compared to some of the other variations which could still work but may seem cluttered or difficult to read at a glance and the team still wanted the UI to match the low poly/arcade-y style we were going for within this project.
Lastly then we have some of the experimental features that I had came up with for how to implement certain UI elements such as Magic Selection and Allowing the player to view a map.
The first two images show a concept of how the player could see and experience the magic selection mechanic. When discussing with the team of ways we could implement a unique way for the player to select there magic abilities. The most popular that I had brought up to the team was that the player would twist a dial on their hands to select the power they wanted.
While the idea sounded like it could be a really unique diegetic UI element, I wasn't so sure of how feasible it was to do or if it was within the limits of our programmers to accomplish a task like this as it seemed like it would be complex to implement. As such I came up with a secondary idea to fall back onto if the first idea became too much of a task.
The second picture shows off what the fall-back idea would look like in theory, the player would select their powers from a button press and the tattoo on their hand would glow a different colour depending on what magic they had selected. A much simpler idea however it would still be in the "Diegetic" category of UI and would be much easier to accomplish and deliver in the end product.
Prototyping Concepts
I ended off this week prototyping the aforementioned UI elements starting with the Health bar, it was relatively easy to implement thanks to a great video by "Underscore" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9pWJZZxyk0 Where he goes on to show off how to implement a 3D health bar in Unreal Engine, while the tutorial was primarily focused towards using it within a Third-Person Shooter I took what he had shown and adapted it towards our VR project
Overall I was really happy with how the prototype looked in game while it needed a lot of polish and tweaking to even be ready for the final project it was a good starting point for us to use when testing.
Lastly then I started messing around creating a Niagara particle system for our Magic Selection tool within the game world. While this particular prototype contains no actual functionality it was more so for me and the team to understand how it might look in game in terms of size, position and colour.
Overall as well I think this was a good starting point for the team to see how the UI elements in game would look and feel there was a lot of information gained this week as well as valuable experience in understanding more about how to create a great User Experience within VR. Looking forward to what is in store for the future of this project.
- L
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