With last week ending on the high that it did I had hoped to ride that wave all the way through the week for Friday's submission. Didn't quite work out that way. Starting the week I had a design I was happy with and through the week I followed through with my plans to test the colour palette, create a number of design breakdowns and so on and while that went relatively smoothly over the Monday and Tuesday I can't help but feel that during the latter half of the week I somewhat stalled.
But like I said I started on Monday keeping that momentum I built up over the course of the week before and started playing around with creating a colour pass. To begin with I was conscious that colour is quite an intimidating subject that while I feel I have the beginnings of a competent understanding of is one I have little practical experience of building from the ground up. I was happy with my initial exploration of the palette and after the feedback I received from the guys in labs I pushed out a first colour pass. It was awful. While the colours individually worked for the most part there was a huge lack of cohesion between elements and as such looked all over the place, a little disheartening but I threw it out for some more critique while I worked on another pass. Mercilessly I slashed the number of colours in half if not by more to what you can see below and I'm much happier with it although in all fairness it probably needs more polish and testing in engine but for now it works and that's all I need.
With the colour scheme down my original intent was to deliver on the brief's final in-game concept which I started but very quickly I felt that it wasn't going to work out. Why? Simply put I'm no illustrator so I decided not to do it and play to my own strengths. This was my first real departure from the brief however looking back I think there's been a growing directional difference with the brief's focus on aesthetic and fitting with the narrative and mine on functionality. Not that I feel that this has resulted in my design not fitting with the desires of the brief, I guess it's more a case of my weighting on what's more important versus the brief. So as I said instead of producing the final concept I played to my strengths and those of my design and work process working up a number of design sheets explaining functionality, a animations, colours and player interactivity to get across my vision of how the smart scope would function. Alongside this I was also able to push out a couple After Effects animations that would compliment the aforementioned sheets with a explanation in motion as well. So in that sense I skipped the final deliverable and began fulfilling the stretch goal for the project.
I feel as if, aside from not delivering the final concept, I have met the brief, the UI is wholly diegetic, it's unique and while I may not have got round to concepting various menus I have incorporated them into design and thought process. I also think that while the brief never really makes a huge emphasis on it the design itself feels as if it could work which is something that has been of huge importance for me through out the project and, possibly more importantly, I'm kinda happy with it. I would love to get the time to push this through to actually working in-engine cos I feel in my mind that's the next step for me, building this thing for real.
Which brings me round to what was plaguing me the last couple days before hand-in. There's been a weird feeling over the course of this brief which came to a head over Wednesday and Thursday and that's the feeling of designing in a vacuum, of being in my own bubble over the past three weeks. As I've worked on this my own relative inexperience with UI has been a constant weight but it has also brought to light the in-experience on the course in general. Not to say that I haven't received great feedback from people, you merely have to read my updates on here to see how much I value the feedback I receive and how that changes and affects the outcomes of my projects but for the HUD I was beginning to feel myself push past what the course team and the year knew and this was beginning to reflect in specific feedback I was looking for. This tied with my own desires to push the project into illustrator and test in engine went beyond the parameters of the brief, ie to simple concept and not build, it felt like I had ground to a slow crawl.
That in a sense created this odd conflict of interest between myself and the brief but I mean even if I had pursued the route of vectorising the design in Illustrator it's not like I would've been able to get it done for hand-in and now on the other side of the project I doubt they'll be much time to continue developing it. Regardless, I'm still stoked I was even able to undertake the project in the first place. There are a couple issues I had with it but I appreciate that it's is first run out, I don't know if the final concept is entirely necessary at least in the "highly polished" form the brief wants, this is maybe more my personal taste and preference but it would be cool if there was maybe a push to get it animated and possibly in engine but I can discuss that in person in labs and hopefully I can provide appropriate feedback from my experience.
In capping off the UI project I feel that it went well but I don't really know, it's hard to say. Lacking another example to compare to there's not a lot I can benchmark from, not in the same way I can with an environment or character. This sentiment extends throughout my effort to reflect on how it went, like with what I would do differently. Again it's hard to say. One thing I would change is taking the time to concept the other menus but not to quite the same level of polish as I've taken the HUD. It would be good to have a visual example of a lot of the menus and functions that I discuss in the design sheets. The other point I'm hovering over is my call to drop the final concept. As I'm writing this I'm personally ok with that decision but I haven't had feedback on the project yet so it might come back as an issue in which case I'll just need to grit my teeth and get it over with. We'll see, once I've talked with the tutors I'll hopefully be in a stronger position to judge on how the project has gone and if necessary what remains to be done.
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