Logo created by Adrian Kindberg, Shaniah Gentry, Nylang Lam, and me

Type: Group

Role: Design Lead, Level Designer, UI/UX Designer

Length: 9 months, ended April 2025

Publisher: DigiPen Institute of Technology

This single-player, third-person melee combat game focuses on the old island shaman, Ila, as she utilizes the power of the elements to fight William Von Pingelton III and his invading robot army. This 30-minute experience will take you from the island beaches to its erupting volcano. The player will gain the power of the elements, unleash their abilities on their foes, and traverse through platforming and combat sections to defeat the Island Invader.

 Game Overview 

Figma Mockups

With any menu or HUD design, I started by brainstorming in Figma. Once I had a few ideas, I would talk it through with the UI artist on the team.

Here are some of the mockups and prototyping I did in the first few months

I made basic medium-fidelity mock-ups of the menus with basic button states and vector art designs. I collaborated with the UI artist to come up with a color scheme

In the beginning, I would make prototypes for concepts that needed further explanation. Later in the project, I would just implement it into the project to test.

Once the artist and I finalized a design, I implemented it into the engine, making animations to communicate changing states. I hooked each animation up according to how the programmers set up the HUD in blueprints.

In the first few months, I created the win screen, lose screen, pause screen, start screen, level select screen, and HUD. I was responsible for the visual design, animation, and implementation of all button states (resting, hovered, and clicked), as well.

Iteration

The game went through quite a few big changes. After 4 months on the project, the game underwent a system design overhaul due to player feedback.

First Overhaul

Elemental abilities were added, and instead of being taken from stations, they replenished passively over time, requiring a HUD redesign.

With the changing systems, I went back to the drawing board with Figma mockups, even sketching some ideas out on paper with the artist.

Second Overhaul

Before implementing the second and third elemental abilities, we found fundamental errors in the existing abilities, level overscope, and misallocated priorities. As Design Advocate, I had to shift gears to focus on these problems.

I was in constant meetings trying to scope down and reallocate attention to make the game better in the time we had left. I created documents outlining the team’s plans with detailed tasks for each department so everyone had the same information and could easily allocate work to their teams.

The main thing that was changed was the first level, which led to the expository story beat. We cut it due to time, exchanging it for a cutscene. I outlined what was needed for each cutscene and added all tutorials to the first level.

The final boss fight was not yet implemented at this late stage, so I made a document outlining what was needed from the engineering, sound, and art departments. I made this based on the many meetings I had with the other advocates and the design team.

This took all of my attention away from UI design for a while, as I had to redesign and whitebox levels while staying in communication with the team as Design Advocate. Once the game was in a better spot, I moved on to another UI re-design.

Towards the end of the project, the art team and I transformed the graphical design of the HUD after a couple of days of back and forth in Procreate.

I was also able to get artist feedback constantly as I worked in-engine with them, constructing our start menu’s composition and creating the Logo.

Reflection

Though I learned a lot about visual design and Widgets in Unreal Engine, this project was so big that I couldn’t entirely focus my energy on UI and UX. There are a lot of things that could improve on UI, and entire menus we didn’t get to. Unfortunately, since we had to go through many big overhauls and we didn’t have a lot of design personnel, UI suffered as a result, but I learned what it was like to manage three big roles on a big project, how to manage time and priorities, how to negotiate, and what to improve on in my leadership.