industry practice - ui & asset development

UI and Asset Development

Organisation

For the Ui's of our game, we decided to spilt the work evenly between two of us. Louie was our lead UI artist, and I agreed to help him with the Ui work as the lead 2D artist. We spilt the tasks evenly among us, to help us work through everything quicker and not pile everything onto one person.

Below, is a list of all the tasks we needed to complete and assigned to each other:

I was tasked with creating the main features of the actual gameplay, such as the interfaces for the Journal Mechanic and Calendar mechanic. As well as this, I was also tasked with creating the text Box UIs. I decided to start brainstorming some ideas by creating a few Pinterest boards and generating and gathering some ideas i thought could work.

Planning and Idea Generation

To begin generating some ideas, i created a few sections on our Pinterest board. Some of these ideas consisted of interfaces from other games that we could use as a source of inspiration for our own work.

Above are a few of the sections i created to help me generate some ideas and gather as sources of inspiration. I began to firstly work on gathering a few ideas  i liked, and creating some notes of things i liked from each of them to incorporate into my own work. I created a few collage style images combined a few ideas i liked together and made notes as i went along. 

For our game, we wanted a calendar mechanic that showcased the passing days as our game takes place over a 5 day structure. By pressing on the calendar in the MC's room, you can see the list of events that take place in the day as well as what day the game is currently on.

We also wanted a journal mechanic, where at the end of each day the MC will write about their day and notes. the journal will be filled via a choice option box mechanic which depicts how the MC viewed their day and their thoughts about it. By choosing the negative options will cause the MC to have a more negative outlook and will effect the story, and vice versa for the positive options.

As well as this, another idea we had for the text boxes within the game were to have them appear as Paper and polaroid's to show the characters and what they are saying. We have a constant theme of polaroid's throughout our game, and we wanted to incorporate that into our menu. The textbox style also ties into the idea of the journal, creating consistency. 

Concepts

I began creating a few concept ideas based on my idea generation and feedback from the other members of my group, of a few text box and calendar variants. As well as this, I also created a fake screenshot of the game to give us an idea of how the interface might look within actual gameplay.

Finalised Designs

Due to a few things in our group changing around, the leftover UI work was given solely for Louie too finish so I could focus on creating the other assets I needed to work on. After creating concepts for the UI, I handed them of to Louie to complete. He was in charge of creating our UI assets and finalised designs so he tool my concepts to be further developed in his own style and finalised!

Background Assets

Instead of working on the UI with Louie, I was instead tasked with creating some of our missing backgrounds. Since there were a few we were still missing, I took on the role of completing them instead. Thankfully, they were only simplistic backgrounds so they were pretty easy to create. We needed a scene for when our MC was on her phone, as well as writing in their journal. We were also missing an environment outside for one transition scene, as we had no other backgrounds that would've been suitable for that scene. My backgrounds are not amazing as I struggle with background design a lot, But I think they still turned out okay and am happy with the result.