This week was tough. I went from having not much to do and loathing it, to having so much to do and getting lost in all of it.

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Our Monday meeting revolved around discussing everything that happened in playtest 1 and what we were going to do moving forward towards playtest 2 in week 9. I drafted a vague and messy 3-week plan of things we could get done, starting from week 9 and working backwards. I outlined what was important to have for the upcoming playtest following the feedback we received from the first one.

A more intelligible version of this was made by me and has been updated since with changes to roles and time adjustments for formative feedback week in week 7. This can be found in the week 6 meeting post in the shared blog.

So… UI, now?

On Thursday I was handed the role of working on the UI. I have very limited experience with UI, my first and last time being during the global game jam a month ago when I created a quick main menu page for Bubble Bros.

On one hand, I am pretty relieved the role got given to me because I was worried that Joe, our technical designer, was taking too much on with being our only programmer. However, Joe was pretty keen on doing the UI because of his familiarity of the work he had been doing on Unity, which was something I was afraid of too – I didn’t want to step on any toes and much less screw up the code he had been working on.

I proposed the idea of splitting the UI design role in half. He would create greyboxes on Unity as placeholders so that he could continue working on the more important parts in the game while I would step in and design the art for the UI that would later replace everything. Both of us were happy with this and that’s how we have proceeded.

I got pretty panicked because the UI plays a massive role in Those Left Behind. Not doing it right, or not giving it enough polish could potentially make or break the game. I can admit I definitely blew things out of proportion, the voices of agony and despair got to me. But it really wasn’t that deep.

My partner was able to get me in contact with a friend hers who is an industrial and product designer and has a lot of experience working with UI/UX design. She gave me the advice that for a project that asks for a style like mine to start on Illustrator or Figma, so that was a nice nudge in the right direction. I plan to document all of the UI work in it’s own area of my development blog section.