The first week back from our summer holiday is Tech Week! We had a whole week to focus on upskilling relevant to our game project with a focus on learning something new. With our Beta deadline fast approaching, I knew it was high time we added some flavour to the UI in Iron Brawlers. So for Tech Week, I wanted to learn how to make some cool renders of our characters and to experiment with turning them into graphic UI elements using Photoshop.
This week was a big challenge for me as graphic design is not my forte. But I thought that starting with a render was a good way to work within my 3D skillset and use Photoshop to transform high-quality images into cool backgrounds.
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| First I captured a render in Maya using Arnold. |
After some colour research, I settled on a colour palette that complimented our character and the vibe we are trying to set. I used Photoshops Poster Edges filter to add some texture and hard shadows to the image before desaturating and recolouring them to match our chosen background colour.
It's all experimentation at this stage, but this little project helped inform our overall approach to our game's UI design and gave us some direction moving forward. Dante jumped on board and we decided to collaboratively to find a look for our UI we were happy with. We took my learnings from tech week to build some other screens for the game, iterating over the course of a week to settle on our current mockup.
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| We experimented with an angled break in the centre of the screen. We thought this could work as the character select background, or a loading screen. |
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| This was an early concept screen mock up. At this stage we are doing away with the traditional character icon layout used by most fighting games. |
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| This is our current character select setup. For Beta, we like this setup because we only have one character variant to play with. We plan to add more characters and a multiple character select interface soon. |
Beta is due in one week, so moving forward we are going to be focused on tuning gameplay, playtesting, and hopefully getting another character in the game. More to come soon!
