planetary pest control – lowercase miles

PLANETARY PEST CONTROL is a two-player asymmetric couch co-op game featuring WRENCH, an alien monkey mechanic, and E.V., his sentient robot companion. Features six levels and up to two hours of comic book alien planet action.

TEAM MEMBERS: AJ Kerr, Louis Sullivan, Sam Auber, Louis Foy, Adrian Carter, Karl Eric Eggert, Martyn Ward, Josh Ward, Aled Garrett, Thomas Pepper, Will Snowden, Nate Bedford, Ed Freifalts, Will Jennet, Marcus Yarnell, Lorenzo Roncarati
YEARS: 2019 - 2020
MY ROLE: UI Artist, UX Designer
ENGINE: Unity

My third year of university was spent working as a UI artist on the game Planetary Pest Control. I was responsible for concepting and creating our UI art style and assets, conducting UX playtests, logo design, miscellaneous graphic elements, and laying out UI elements in Unity. The project took 9 months in total to complete.

HEADS UP: This is the bit where I go IN-DEPTH on things like PROCESS and UI ITERATION and DEVELOPMENT. I may have had too much fun. Enjoy, and my apologies to your internet.

UNFORTUNATELY, this section needs to be viewed on a LANDSCAPE TABLET or BIGGER, because it's a REALLY COOL IN-DEPTH COMIC that I absolutely did NOT design for mobile resolutions. I'm hoping to create a version that's scaled to mobile SOON™, but for now, please view on a BIGGER MONITOR. Introducing instead: THE NEXT SECTION.

Text styled to look like a comic book panel. Panel one says,

A photo of a university room filled with computer monitors. On it are three comic panels which say,

A screenshot of a pinterest board with the text caption,

Four comic panels over a mockup of two differently styled health bars, one sci-fi, one comic book. The panels say,

NOT GONNA LIE, making all of the above kinda took it out of me. So the rest of this should be a little simpler and easier to skim. Hooray!

The MENUS never changed that much. The HUD had established the presence and importance of dynamic angles in the UI, so that was my starting point. I created the MAIN MENU first, creating a diagonal background with diagonal buttons and text outlines inspired by the Disco Elysium logo. When it came to wordier pages like the LEVEL SELECT screen, I realised that white text on black is a little hard to read and inverted our colours to get black on white instead. Since the world and art style is so vibrant, I chose a yellow-orange as a consistent accent colour used to catch the eye and add visual interest.

This project was also the first time I explored the use of wireframes as a part of user interface. Previously, I'd only heard the term in the context of 3D meshes. With bulky pages containing lots of information like the LEVEL SELECT screen (back again!) I found them so useful that I've incorporated them as a mandatory part of my process ever since.

The MENUS never changed that much. The HUD had established the presence and importance of dynamic angles in the UI, so that was my starting point. I created the MAIN MENU first, creating a diagonal background with diagonal buttons and text outlines inspired by the Disco Elysium logo. When it came to wordier pages like the LEVEL SELECT screen, I realised that white text on black is a little hard to read and inverted our colours to get black on white instead. Since the world and art style is so vibrant, I chose a yellow-orange as a consistent accent colour used to catch the eye and add visual interest.

This project was also the first time I explored the use of wireframes as a part of user interface. Previously, I'd only heard the term in the context of 3D meshes. With bulky pages containing lots of information like the LEVEL SELECT screen (back again!) I found them so useful that I've incorporated them as a mandatory part of my process ever since.

Because I've got a whole lot of files from this project sitting around my computer and an awful lot of work tends to go unseen on most games, here's a bunch of other random assets created for the project. There's some animation mockups, concept art, sprite sheets I couldn't find another section to showcase, and more.

FIN.