The polar protocol

The game is a top-down 3D action game.

You are a Snow man in a metal suite sent by the Kingdom to fight against the evil corporation that settled in the Polar that want to melt all the snow and monetise the environmental crisis.

My Role
UX/UI Designer

Platform
Unity

Duration
Three weeks

Team
12 people

Ideation

Together with the rest of UX/UI team we created the foundation of the visuals together.

Crazy 8’s. We did Crazy 8’s on the basic scenes based on the core gameplay the Game Designers did. I had my own board of crazy 8’s of Start Menu, High Score, Pause Menu, Game Over and HUD. We later did dot voting on the sketches we liked the best.

wireframes

Mid-fidelity wireframes. After Crazy 8 and Moodboard I created mid-fidelity for Game Pause and Game Over with the Leaderboard to see how the flow can look like.

Iteration

I iterated on the Game Over flow as I wasn’t satisfied with the mid-fidelity. I used the same style as the Health Bar sprite I created to have a cohesive design between the sprites. I added a rusty color on the highlighted row to get a complementary color to our base color blue and also to get a more industrial feeling as the game is in a factory (Version 1).

Version 2. We went thorugh the two versions I designed and they thought we should go without a background and only have an outlined border. For my part I thought it would be better to have a filled background so the design are cohesive.

Version 3. After Alpha Feedback from our mentors we iterated the UI:s so it followed the art style of the game. The problem here was we were done with the UI before the level and art design and only saw the Alpha one our before the deadline due to lack of communication between teams.

Wireframes & Unity implmentations

After the Alpha I started sketching the tutorial panel. It got easier to do because of the other sprites that was done. I reused the leaderboard background and made it bigger so it could be used as a tutorial panel but also for the other panels, for example the credits.

Due to time limitation I was aiming to do a simple tutorial panel with only images and text. When I started implementing it on Unity, I decided to include short videos in the tutorial to make it more clear for the user how the mechanics work.