Working with the UI

Hello again, it’s time for another post about our 10 week project “Possession”!

This week I started on working with the User Interface. The UI is what the player can see on the screen, such as health bars and current power-ups. This artifact can be a little difficult to work with, since I have to discuss a lot about what looks good, and how we want the  UI to look in game. I started out drawing icons for the elements fire, water and wood which are the three different elements the player can switch between for added firepower against certain enemies. The first images got finished and asked the team what they thought about them. They looked too plain and didn’t really fit into the style of the concept, so I scrapped them and started making new ones.

The first versions of the element icons.

I started making the new icons, trying to make them look more fitting for the concept. It was pretty tough at the start, but with some help from Christoffer, I managed to learn some more tricks and made some new icons. I also added frames for the icons and made different versions of smaller icons for the elemental points. The main element icons still were not good enough to fit the style of our game, and once again I had to start over.

These were the second versions of the element icons, together with the frames and the different versions of the smaller icons.

For the third version of the icons, I asked Christoffer again for some tips on how to make them fit the style of the game. He told me that thicker outlines would bring out the feel of the old Asian paintings. I took his advice and started making the leaf (tree element) from scratch. The making of the new leaf went well as I managed to add some neat shadows to make it look more interesting. Sadly these details will not be seen because of how small they are, but it was fun making it anyways. I also added some background colors to the frames, to make the icons even more visible and make it less dull.

So far I only made a new leaf and some background colors on the frames.

I’m pretty happy with the result of the new leaf. all that remains now is to make the water and fire element in the same style, and changing the frame backgrounds for said elements. Hopefully I will get this done during the remaining days of this week.
Cheers!