star citizen – lowercase miles

ABOUT:

ART DIRECTION: Ian Leyland
UI DIRECTION: Simon Bursey
YEARS: 2020 - 2021
MY ROLE: UI Artist, UX Designer

As a UI artist at Firesprite working in collaboration with Cloud Imperium Games, I was responsible for designing and implementing updated user interface for the Arena Commander game modes using Cloud Imperium Games’ Building Blocks tool and building off work started by Samuel Salmon in line with the games' established Aegis ship style. This included a new frontend for the mode, scoreboard variants, in-game notifications, and further unreleased work. Since my departure from the project, several of these screens have been implemented.

SCOREBOARDS:

MOCKUPS MADE IN ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR FOLLOWING THE ESTABLISHED AEGIS STYLE.

I was asked to modernise the scoreboards and create designs that could be used across a variety of gamemodes and would scale to elegantly display as many players as needed. I was directed to match the Aegis style, but I also wanted to match the diegetic ships Star Citizen is known for, using glassy effects and shaders to emphasise a modern, futuristic look.

THE SCOREBOARD AS IMPLEMENTED AT THE TIME OF MY DEPARTURE FROM THE PROJECT.

THE SCOREBOARD AS IMPLEMENTED IN ALPHA 3.28

ARENA COMMANDER FRONTEND:

One of my final tasks was to update both the UX and visuals for the Arena Commander module's frontend. Star Citizen's UI has grown simpler and more modern over time, but the frontend UI lagged behind with excellently done but outdated mid-2000s metal textures. Furthermore, one had to click through up to four submenus to get into game. My task was to condense all menus into a single screen and modernise the art style to match Star Citizen's current direction.

I chose to imitate the style used by Star Citizen's main frontend to unify the different gamemodes. The Party, Friends, and Notifications menus were taken directly from that frontend, as I wanted to reuse assets where possible. Star Citizen is a PC targeted title, which allowed me to embrace the use of a cursor and condense the sub menus into drop-down lists.

My friend and colleague at Cloud Imperium was kind enough to send me the below, which is how the menu has since been updated and implemented. I'm a big fan of their changes. Ships are Star Citizen's big selling point, and it makes for a much more engaging menus to have them front and centre. They've also made a good use of the negative space, reducing how much space the lobby element takes up and making it easier to scan the screen quickly.

MISCELLANEOUS:

CONCEPTS

IMPLEMENTATION

Below, timestamped, you can see further progress from the excellent developers at Cloud Imperium Games, including scoreboard variants that I designed.

Below you can see further progress from the excellent developers at CIG, including scoreboard variants that I designed.

I contributed further work that has yet to be released, including a styleguide, icons, interactive wireframes, and motion graphics for the Arena Commander module. In the video below (timestamped), you can see work iterated and developed from my contributions in the frontend and spawn screen. I did UX and graphic work on these. The spawn screen was a difficult task -- there was a lot of information to fit onto a single screen, and I'm very pleased to see the result.