FAN UI
On and off when I have time
Fictional work
I love watching game reveals and along with the excitement of new gameplay is the thought of exciting new UX. Because what is a UI/UX screen if not the embodiement of new features, progression and gameplay.
Please enjoy these fan UX explorations of games I love playing in my own time, I will add more quite often!
Personal take on what would an Overwatch battleroyale game look like. What flows and incentives would be exposed.
Played Gears 5 recently and I had issues with keeping up with my active reload UI. I was surprised it was placed in such a low-visibility area in the corner of the screen so I did a quick mock-up of something that would help on that issue. I took this as an opportunity to bring things closer in to the focus zone so that the Player could stay more focused on the action in the center of the screen. Same thing with Dave's ability.
Couple of what-ifs for my favorite game; the current Covenant panel doesn't feel epic enough for me so I tried a symmetric layout as well as showing you how much you are about to deposit which I think is missing from live. I think that's why Blizzard game layouts have always spoke to me with how powerful the layouts are with ther strong symmetry.
Good defaults are an important UX principle so another tiny QOL would be to make creating a M+ group easier by simply right-clicking your Keystone in your bags. It would open the StartAGroup panel and pre-fill it with simple text presets, your current ilevel and rating as requirements.
Another one is using a modifier key such as shift during the Disenchanting process to allow batch disenchanting instead of having to activate it every time. It would modernize this process which would be beneficial for many professions.
The next one is a really basic menu for a Warcraft single player RPG (one can dream!).
The Pick Phase is the step right after the matchmaking process has sent 3 players into a game, basically your pre-game lobby. The flow is composed of 4 steps:
- the mission's objectives and threats are exposed to the team for them to anticipate the challenges
- the picking commences with which Operator to choose from, players see their teammate's selection
- once an Operator is chosen, the player goes over their weapons and gear
- once all 3 players lock in their selection, the screen ends and a 3D action shot is played, each character playing a short pose animation
It was a great challenge to design as the elements to expose to the player changed over time as we defined what a "normal" game was (objectives, XP, random threats, other teammate's weapons or not, etc.). We did a lot of wires on this flow and screens alongside the art and game design team. We also had to collab a lot with animators for the end action poses. For bloopers, we even started in the beginning with a turn-based selection flow to prevent players from fighting over the same Operator, which we canned a bit later.
UI Art: Pascal Caplette
Game Design: Nicolas Jaujou, Andrea Zanini
