Week 7 + 8: Defining the Style Direction

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During week 7, I read Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman and The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell and took notes to use for my DE4401 essay. 

Book Notes: 




After submitting my essay, I returned to project 2 and continued to define my style direction by adding to my Pinterest board, collecting further examples of existing UI designs and creating a mood board.  




Initially, I came up with the idea to make a crosshair design inspired by a submarine radar which indicated the direction of enemies. Since my game is based within a submarine, I later decided that a radar-inspired crosshair wouldn't be useful to the player as the environment isn't very spacious. Instead, I came up with the idea to create a unique crosshair design for each weapon. I aim for each crosshair design to be distinctive from one another to quickly indicate to the player what weapon they are using/switching to. I also intend for the ammo count of each weapon to be incorporated within its unique crosshair design, and for the overall design of the crosshairs to represent each weapon's intensity and characteristics. 

Since I aim to make individual crosshair designs for each weapon, I want to use unique animation styles for each design to further differentiate the crosshairs and better represent the character and intensity of each weapon. I collated various examples of crosshair animations in the video below to use as a reference and see how various crosshair designs communicate information to the player such as headshots, hits and kills. 


Location: Preston, UK

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