Kevin W.

Ship User Interfaces Player Interactivity Enemy Animations Environmental Design

Custom Enemy Models Options Ship Frontal HUD

Team Role: Generalist / Designer

Team Size: 2

Development Time: 1+ Year

Ship User Interfaces (Screens)

Designed to immerse players into flying a spaceship in a futuristic setting.
Implementing additional menus made easier due to a list of "points" to look at and programmatically lerp between screens.
Features necessary elements such as heads-up display and options screen.

Player Interactivity

Implemented and designed ways to keep the player immersed with action elements in the HUD (lives/bombs) and provide feedback during gameplay (controller vibration for specific events, sparks, lights flickering).
Player Asteroid Shield provides realism to space combat experience helping protect the players from space debris.
The asteroid shield among many other elements had many iterations but a look back at the original effect is featured here.

Enemy Animations

Programmatically created most enemy animations to provide better flexibility for designs due to Unreal Engines animation system requiring skeletons.
Simple geometrical enemies meant the benefit of needing only simple geometrical almost puzzle-like rotations and movements for their animations.
Ideas of transforming and rotating a Rubik's Cube was used for some enemies whereas Hoberman Spheres were also thought of.

Custom Enemy Models

Created custom models in Blender with the intent to reduce polygon count for optimizations within the game.
Models are textured and UV mapped using a pre-existing asset pack with emission and normal maps.
Most of the enemy designs are based on the enemy's functionality, ex the Dodger has arms to push itself out of the way of incoming projectiles.

Options

Features all settings for players which update in real-time.
Simple layout to help organize information quickly so new and experienced players can always quickly find what they are looking for.
Provides customization for controllers and partial accessibility for players who may find swapping keybinds useful.

Ship Frontal HUD

Designed to quickly show vital information to the player. Prioritizing reusable information towards the middle of the player's common vision spots.
Keeping Score/Multiplier easy to identify and read helps players know how to maximize points gained within the game and reach higher spots in the leaderboard.
3D Spatial map allows players to understand where enemies are in relation to themselves.

Environmental Design

Designed a simplistic but modular environment to help players focus on the gameplay objectives of killing enemies.
Randomizes the environment every time a combat session is started to provide a unique colorful experience to players.
Environment is handled through a management system, easily modifying future changes for the combat zone to amplify immersion or adjust player focus within combat.

Designed implementation of the Spinner enemy.

Comically exploding ship when the player dies in game.

Blackhole Enemy that players will encounter within the game.

Asteroid Field that players will fly through

The first iteration of the asteroid field where the asteroids would jiggle.

Planetary rings animating across.

One of the screens which introduces the player to the game.