MA Study into Customisable Game UI

For a recent essay, I was required to interview industry professionals to get some insights into the gaming industry.  After exploring the responses, I wanted to review Alex Bellingham's answers in a little more depth.  Alex currently works as a freelance UX/UI designer. He worked for Sony Playstation defining UI practices for VR that have now been adopted by most VR studios. Since leaving there he has ventured into designing UI for VR, web and mobile for companies such as Red Bull, IBM, CT, Cisco and Burberry. 1. Please can you give a brief introduction about yourself? (years in industry, companies, roles, and responsibilities) " I’m Alex Bellingham and I’m a Senior UX / UI Designer working across web, mobile, experiential & AR/VR. I worked for 5 years at Sony PlayStation defining best practices for VR UI on PlayStation VR; these would then be adopted by many of the VR development studios to use in their own experiences. " " Since I left around 4 years ago I tra

For a recent essay, I was required to interview industry professionals to get some insights into the gaming industry. By contacting professional game designers, it allowed me to get an idea of the current state of accessibility within the industry and professional opinions on the potential for improvements in this area. Richard Warner – Avalanche Studios Richard is a Lead Artist at Avalanche Studios, Stockholm. He has been in the games industry for eight years, starting at Stainless Games on the Isle of Wight, then moving to Sweden to work at Starbreeze and then Avalanche. Do you think that the games industry could be more inclusive when it comes to players with disabilities? Richard talks about ‘ enforcement of the CVAA law ’ and how the ‘ games and technology industry include a base line implementation of accessibility features within their products .’ He goes on to talk about Microsoft’s companywide standards for games and platforms making them ‘ champions for accessibility .’ He

With an MA deadline approaching, I was going through my work and found a couple of HUD designs that I had forgotten to post. This is my design for the an RPG HUD.  I decided to go online and search for game screenshots. I found this and decided to create a HUD with no context or ideas about mechanics. I wanted to focus purely on the aesthetics of my design working with the aesthetics of the game.  I included the key display elements: Bars I created a health and stamina bar in the top left of the screen. I wanted to try to incorporate swords into this design in order to match the dark, gothic, fantasy aesthetic of the screenshot. I used a sword hilt for the larger health bar and a dagger hilt for the smaller stamina bar. I really like how these turned out and look forward to making more custom bars in the future! Currency The lower left of the screen shows the player's current wealth and how much money they have available to spend on upgrades, items and equipment.

With an MA deadline approaching, I was going through my work and found a couple of HUD designs that I had forgotten to post. This is my design for the an RPG HUD.  I decided to go online and search for game screenshots. I found this and decided to create a HUD with no context or ideas about mechanics. I wanted to focus purely on the aesthetics of my design working with the aesthetics of the game.  I included the key display elements: Bars I created a health, magic and stamina bar in the top left of the screen. I colour coded these with the colours used in other RPG games such as Skyrim. I also used an Asian themed sigil in the corner to reflect the aesthetic of the screenshot. D Pad In the lower left corner I created a weapon wheel which corresponds to the D Pad on console controllers. Up on the D Pad lets the player use a fire ability which I referenced from the orange glowing shoulder pads on the player character. The side buttons on the D Pad draw the character's weapon, a doubl

In my previous post, I came up with a concept in which players would have the ability to enter the options menu in their game and drag and drop interface components into different slots. This design would then show in-game and allow the players both creative freedom and increased accessibility if needed. I decided to create some very basic visuals of how this options menu and slot customisation would look in the Valheim recreation I made. Players will be able to drag and drop each predesigned component from the side of the screen into their desired slot. This will update the UI within the game and allow players to play the game with their own customised layout available to them.

After working on the Valheim UI, I realised that I made many creative decisions that were very different from the original design. Be these subjective or objective changes, there were many elements that I moved to different locations around the screen. I realised that, while these changes to location made sense creatively, not everyone would agree with my placement decisions. These placements may also cause issues in terms of playability. For example, my design may subconsciously cater to right handed players, as I myself am right handed. This layout would not be as user-friendly to left handed players who may find themselves at a disadvantage during intense, game changing moments. I started to think on how I could change this in order to benefit all players and maximise accessibility. The problem I found is that you can't please everyone - there will always be one person who dislikes or disagrees with your design.  But what if we could let players design for themselves? What if th