Project Caspian is another work-in-progress game. It's basically a next-gen MMO with some really unusual and cool content. The theme we were exploring with the game is pulp inspired but the look and feel are still being hashed out. This provided me with an opportunity to explore various themes, materials and technologies that might help define the game.
The first UI we started with was a basic mission pop-up. This was created mostly by
Scott Willoughby a long-time friend and member of my UI team with some direction from me and the Senior Art Director,
Bruce Sharp.
The Next piece we made is the mission journal. This piece was also a collaboration between Scott and I. He made most of the pieces and I arranged the final composition.
We experimented with using some more of these real world things to base other pieces of UI off of but quickly found out that it was just too heavy handed so we tried a different approach. I began experimenting with the character sheet as a jumping off point for the rest of the UI.
This piece is my first attempt. I was inspired by old brass and copper art deco clocks and radios.
We used this as a jumping off point to make other game control type pieces of UI like the HUD etc.
The next piece was the skill purchase UI.
The first piece I did ended being a little bit muddy and I received feedback to make it 'less brown'. We took some time to try using different materials to define the UI frames.
This one is inspired by industrial age technology.
At this point, if you are actually reading this, you are probably wondering where the Pulp influence went. I created a few mock-ups of the character creation process where I tried to bring the pulp back. (the book cover illustration was borrowed for the purposes of this layout and the badge doo-hickys are cobbled together from various images on GIS) Scott did the background table setting wood and paper.
The next piece is the Appearance Selection Screen and it is even more of a WIP than the archetype screen but you get the idea.
