Gravitas
-Work in Progress: Gameplay-
Technical Designer / Writer / Voice Actor || FPS Puzzle-Platformer || Unreal 4.8 || 13 developers || 5 months
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USER INTERFACE DESIGN

All of the UI/UX work I did on Gravitas was to the Main Menu and Ending Credits sequence.
Updating the Main Menu
Since I had created the menus and done significant UI work on the previous 2 Guildhall game projects, my team members asked me to polish the main menu of Gravitas.
I created a new level dedicated to the opening menu, placed cameras all around it (one for each menu section), added some blended transitions between them, created a special 'start game' sequence where the camera would fly through a door into black, and cleaned up the layout of the menu Widgets. I also added animation, screen fades during transitions, and repositioned the menu elements to flow better with the background environment.
Each Main Menu section had a special background in the lobby area:

The initial menu after the splash screens looked out over the overall lobby, with the centerpiece sculpture rotating in right side of the menu. If the player selects "Start Game", they transition to the main door, must enter a name for their save profile, and fly through the doors as they open into black to begin the experience. Since this is the first thing every player ever sees within Gravitas, I wanted it to be a well-composed shot that introduced players to the beauty and cube-focused aesthetic of our game world.

The Options Menu blended over to a camera looking down at a bench covered in the special literature created for the game. One book in particular, an appropriate textbook titled "How Does Cubes Work?", is centered below the menu windows.

The Level Select Menu camera zooms in on a small LCD screen at the base of the centerpiece. This screen presents the player with a list of the save files found in memory, and upon selection opens a scrolling list of every level with assossiated titles and pictures. This setup turned the Level Select Menu into a sort of directory for the Gallery, and set up a nice camera transition through the main doors when the player selects their desired level.
Overall, I was very pleased with the Main Menu's final version.
Animating the Credits