About

I was brought on to the project around September 2022 while working for UX is Fine, and was tasked with developing a style guide for the game’s UI. Something that could be handed off to Free Range Game’s internal UI team for final implementation, at that point consisting of Quinn Le (Senior UX Designer).

Over the course of about 4 weeks of back and forth with stakeholders - Jon-Paul Dumont (Game Director) and Bradley Fulton (Art Director) - I went from research to blue sky iteration to defining the pillars of the game’s UI style and setting up pipelines for outsourcing icon creation. I began using the game’s HUD + Inventory as a test bed for the overall shape language, various button styles, typography and iconography rules, color palette, etc.

After the HUD+Inventory were approved, I onboarded a small team of artists over another 8 weeks to go wider with the style and assist with fleshing out Character Create and Crafting screens as well as beginning iteration on the many many icons needed, and with exploring Map solutions for their proceduralized world in Unreal.

As UI Art Director on the project for UXIF I managed the team, delegated and tracked tasks, and onboarded more folks as icon needs grew through the contract. I was also the point of contact for the client, and handled creation of the UI Style Guide deliverables as well as writing up documentation in their Confluence as an implementation guide with sizing rules, color rules with hex codes, text rules, and even how to implement specific textures as materials.

As a Tolkien fan it was a real joy getting to dive deep into the lore for this project, even making an iconography set for the Angerthas runic alphabet. Overall it was a challenge working on a short timeline, but equally rewarding and fun to develop Dwarven themed UI that didn’t have the baggage of being tied to the Peter Jackson adaptations. The team at Free Range Games were an absolute pleasure to work with, and provided great feedback and direction from the beginning.

Team Members:

Piotr Kopertowski (Senior UI Artist) - Iconography and Menu design

Grant Thurston (Senior UI Artist) - Map tech exploration and Unreal implementation

Jerome Tieh (UI Artist) - Iconography and Map style exploration

Evan Cheng (UI Art Intern) - Iconography

Tania Gonzalez (UI Art Intern) - Iconography