2003 - "SW:KOTOR" (Xbox/PC)
UI Concepting
UI Concepting
This was a turning point in my career. Starting off as a character texturer, i eventually switched to a full-time User Interface artist. I had a great time using my illustration and graphic deisgn knowledge together, instead of just one or the just the other.
Star Wars: KOTOR was the first project where i started to come up with my own UI process. Neverwinter was a great learning process, but console was a different monster. Text sizes were an issue, over 100+ screens to deal with, and a lower resolution screen (640x480) was a huge issue.
Later on in the concept phase i was influenced by the 1st prequel (phantom menace) pod racing. The pod racing was one of the only places where there were lines/graphics of cool tech i could pull from. The look was mostly based off of glowing lines, hard angles along with long curves.
Early on in the concept phase, i was waaay into the look of the old ships in the first Star Wars trilogy (4,5,6). Lots of simple shapes with hard angles (mostly hexes). I felt it complimented the blueprint of the underlaying ships, and other floating tech lines.
This is an example of screen layouts from the designers. It was helpful for knocking out concepts closer to the finished product, very early in development (in pre-production). Even though it would not look like this in the end, alot of the elements would stay in-game, but shuffled around to other screens.
In the case above, we thought we would want the HUD to show at all times in the bottom, even in pause state. Eventually we would find out it would take up too much screen space, and have to dedicate space to another screen within the pause menu (character stats screen).
