The Hip Hop Dance Experience (Xbox 360) Developer : INIS
Publisher : Ubisoft
Project Roles : Lead UI design, voice actor direction, graffiti artist coordinator, content consultant
Publisher : Ubisoft
Project Roles : Lead UI design, voice actor direction, graffiti artist coordinator, content consultant
Ingame / Menu / UI Overview
The project was a challenge in terms of visual language, a mainstream dance game with a hard hip hop image that covers all eras of the musical culture is a difficult balance to achieve.
The Headline font was inspired by Hip Hop event flyers and magazines such as THE SOURCE.
1st Draft mockup for "Dance Marathon" mode UI and effects
The art director wanted to pursue a graffiti motif and to use the traditional graffiti arrow shape as a recurring element, sadly due to localization constraints and legibility, we had to compromise the amount of graffiti after the 1st draft experiments.
As I had experience with graffiti culture, I also created a lot of street art elements for UI and background textures.
As I had experience with graffiti culture, I also created a lot of street art elements for UI and background textures.
Player performance feedback (First draft)
The first draft of player feedback incorprated a graffiti "rank", plus a count of diamonds to show the quality of performance within the rank.
However the characters' feet obscured this, and adding in the visual complexity of a graffiti style to the text resulted in confusion for the player, as they were unable to gauge their performance at a quick glance.
Localization issues were also a point of concern, so we iterated a more easily understandable and dynamically localizable option for Ubisoft to consider.
However the characters' feet obscured this, and adding in the visual complexity of a graffiti style to the text resulted in confusion for the player, as they were unable to gauge their performance at a quick glance.
Localization issues were also a point of concern, so we iterated a more easily understandable and dynamically localizable option for Ubisoft to consider.
The video below shows an example of the motion graphics for this first iteration of player feedback.
Player feedback : Final version
As the characters feet obscured the graffiti feedback concept way too much,my final revision of player feedback was designed as a ring around the player that filled as the player successfuly matched the motion correctly, resulting in feedback text displayed in a slightly conical 3D ring to assist legibility due to the game camera position.
As the characters feet obscured the graffiti feedback concept way too much,my final revision of player feedback was designed as a ring around the player that filled as the player successfuly matched the motion correctly, resulting in feedback text displayed in a slightly conical 3D ring to assist legibility due to the game camera position.
Performance feeback : Final version concept.
"Peak performance" visual feedback concept.
Graffiti Artist co-ordination
GPK Crew at work
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Thanks to my previous experience with the American and European graffiti scene, I was also able to recruit Miami based Graffiti crew, GPK (Garbage Pail Kids) to assist on a contract basis for original monochrome sketches, and for the sake of budget fill in the sketches myself in photoshop. I then proceeded to create motion graphic transition mockup examples in AfterEffects to recreate in Flash for 2D UI and Unreal for 3D UI. |
Title Calls
Each different stage, that reflected the selected song style also required a thematically matched "title call" for the song intro. The keywords were "Shadow", "Gold", "Glam", "Graffiti", "Lighstshow" and "Lowrider"
Each different stage, that reflected the selected song style also required a thematically matched "title call" for the song intro. The keywords were "Shadow", "Gold", "Glam", "Graffiti", "Lighstshow" and "Lowrider"
Menu mockup slideshow