About the Project
Roombaction is one of many projects made during a 3 day game jam organized by the Game Development Club at the University of Utah. The theme of this game jam was "reflections".
Due to a lack of artists and a lot of designers I was in charge of both designing and creating the assets for the UI and main menu. I got to practice my UI designing skills again as well as try to flex my artistic muscles with making the assets themselves. While I didn't do anything that new on this project, it was nice to continue working on skills I already know I enjoy.
UI Design
I had two major parts I needed to design for in this project: The main menu and the in game HUD. The main menu was fairly straightforward as not many buttons were needed, but I always enjoy trying to design it to not only look good but convey the important information well, which I definitely feel like I did.
In the Main Menu I also created a "How to Play" screen where I created a brief description similar to an elevator pitch with the basic controls of the game. While this doesn't seem to be very notable it was surprisingly good practice for being able to pitch a game in a couple short sentences.
The more interesting part of my part in this project was the HUD design, although a lot less assets were required. The idea behind this game is you have to refract lasers that you shoot around a map filled with mirrors to kill enemies without accidentally shooting yourself with a refracted laser. I try to make the HUD as simple as I can while also clearly displaying all the info necessary, so I ultimately decided to only include a wave counter, health bar, ammo counter, and score counter.
To make the HUD a little more diegetic I made the wave counter show up in a little crystal sprite that I am actually very proud of, I think it looks really good. For the health bar I created a Roomba icon that turns into a gray version of itself after the player loses a life. For the ammo counter, I had a simple gun icon to show which gun you were holding as well as the actual ammo number to the left of the gun. On the top right is a simple score counter with nothing fancy.
While I didn't get to work on this project as much as I would have liked as there were people already in charge of the level design and combat design which I wanted to try out, it was a nice fun project to get some more practice working with a team and designing UI.
