PROJECT NAME
Eden Rising Supremacy
For PC & Consoles
ROLE
- Freelance Graphical Designer
DATE
- June to July 2018
Contact
email@domain.com
000-000-000
GAME DESCRIPTION
Eden Rising is a brand new action-packed Open World game!
Explore the vast world of Eden and defend your bases from hordes of alien monsters. Make use of everything you collect to craft powerful defenses, upgrade your weapons, and unlock challenges.
- Explore a vast open world and uncover the secrets of Eden!
- Craft awesome weapons, armor, and defenses!
- Defend your bases!
- Play solo or up to 8 player online co-op!
MY JOB DESCRIPTION
The Eden Rising team hired me as a Freelance Graphical Designer to rework their current Prototype User Interface systems. My goal was create an early design proposition for both the UI systems and User Experience flow and have it polished visualy afterwards.
Also, at the core of my job I had to redesign the game for controller support and, eventually, consoles.
I was asked to prove my worth first and so the management team tasked me three of the main pillars of their game:
- The Siege mode (aka Tower Defense mode),
- The Main Menus, and
- The World Map assets.
SIEGE MODE UI
The Game relied heavily on contextual prompts everywhere as well as a central UI pop-up for all menus and interactions; that last one was really challenging.
As the reason the team worked with that pop-up system was 4:3 ratio support and being able to see incoming attacks even when managing in-menus.
As a gamer myself, I had ideas to explore, and see if they were interested in them. But, for now, in these early designs, I tried to refrain from breaking out too much of their codes and current art direction.
WORLD MAP ASSETS
The World Map was pretty much done at this point but the team didnt like their icons and icons color hierarchy. So I came up with new icons for all item types and interactibles.
The bright magenta color was their accent color. They wished to use that without fail, so I played with opposites and color blind values.
Magenta is the player,
Blue would be enemies,
Green/Yellow with be passive/active player controled elements, and
White/grey would be environment interactibles and items.
CHARACTER EQUIP
For the character menu prototype, I kept the big pop-up system they had, but refined it so it looked more polished.
The biggest change was to use a top menu where icons are bulletpoints and only the title change based on clicks or RB/LB buttons to swap for controllers.
The first iteration proposed a grid like inventory with equipments being centered around the character render and stats on the right hand side.
The second idea, was to have more of a complete equipment/stats only menu, with contextual pop-ups for equiping, this version moved the inventory to another tab with much more space and freedom of use.
INVENTORY
Like mentionned above, the inventory system needed to be big!
Why? It had to also show all your storages as some waypoints locations allowed free transfers in-between your stash and your storage…!
So we came up with a twin sided window system to exchange from one to another. Trash items could also be dropped with a button or dragged to and overflow allowed for a single safekeeping in case of overbloat.
CRAFTING
Crafting was the base of the game economy. Creating items and equipment with materials found throughout the world was a must to survive the dangers it had lurking for the unaware traveler.
I explored two concepts, one with ahorizaontal system, another with a boxed system. The team opted for the box system, which I used consistantly throughout all other mockups.
That's also where I initially designed the item details prompt.
CODEX & TECH
The Codex was basically a quest tracker menu. It had to allow a list of quests, show its location, have a text description, mission steps, if available, and close off with rewards for completion.
The Tech menu on the other hand was still cryptic to me at the time.
It was a skill tree that would be locked behind tiers per region achievements. The more points acquired by performing well in the Tower Defense modes would convert to skill points to use in each tech trees. Hence, allowing more customization, unique traps, perks, passives and upgrades.
UPGRADE STATION
The last part of the gameplay loop involved the upgrading of your own equipments. Each weapon ad armor could follow different tracks of upgrades to perform better against XYZ types of ennemies.
Take your Glaive into the Burning damage tree, or the Paralyze tree or the Corruption tree, etc.
It mixed itself with the crafting menu that I had already designed and added the new weapon trees system.
EDEN RISING SUPREMACY
CREDITS 2018
General Manager
Kim Pasquin
Producer
- Fabien Collard
Game Design
- Brent Ellison
Art Direction
Monica Langlois
Tech UI Artist
- Robin Bonhoure
UI Art & Design
- Maxime Laramée-Roby
- Teddy Blanc
Texture Artist
- T. Ryan McLean
3D Artists
Alexandre Etendard
Normand Gaudreau
Simon Peloquin