Development of initial designs

After drawing initial ideas for our interface designs, we then had to recreate our designs using computer software Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Initially, I was told I had to use Photoshop to create my designs, but I thought it would be easier for my designs, if I created them using Illustrator, because I find it a lot easier to create things from scratch using Illustrator. I felt it is also convenient how you can transfer files created in Illustrator into Photoshop.

Initial Designs using Illustrator

Bullet Count

This is a very basic design for my bullet count, which includes a framed circle with lines around it to form rays of sunshine, a very aztec - like shape. Aztecs also seemed to like zig-zag patterns and sun shapes in their art, which also influenced this design, and a lot of others you will see on this post later. My ideas for this would be to have the number of bullets in the centre of the circle, and maybe have some markers around the edge of the circle to mark how many bullets the player would have remaining. I could add these in later designs.

This is my more detailed bullet count design, separating the circle with a few lines and rectangles.The idea for this design is that the bars at the sides decrease as the bullets get used up. This will help people who can't read numbers easily.

I haven't added any numbers yet, since I wanted to keep this separate, and I will add this in Photoshop. I also need to add colour, but I thought that I should leave it black and white until I'm ready to insert it in Photoshop. It's also probably easier to add colour to things in Photoshop.

Health Bar

 

My first design idea is very similar to that of my bullet count - a sun shape made from circles and zig-zag patterns. I have also added a rectangle to represent the actual 'health bar', with a patterned border around it. This will be a good initial design to work from.

 

This is practically the same as above but with an eye in the middle of the circle. Eyes are also a huge part of aztec art, as found out in my research. Also gives more of a creative feel to it

 

I also attempted to create one of the looped health bars taken from my initial sketches, which is inspired from the health bar from the Kingdom Hearts games (see initial design research). I found this very difficult after not using Illustrator efficiently for a while, and I feel this is probably the weakest of all of my designs.

Weapon/Tool Display

I wasn't really too sure on how to design this, as when doing my research, I thought we had to design an actual weapon, not have the list of weapons/tools and design how we were going to select them, so this design was purely experimental.

I wanted to keep this simple, as I haven't had much time to think of how to design this, so what I thought was to try and keep this similar to my other designs and use zig zags and circles, and then I added a silhouette of each tool to some of the zig zags. I just hope this design will work when colouring it, and I hope it will be clear  about which tool the player will be using, which is something to consider when creating this UI even further.

Minimap

I chose to stick with the totem pole minimap design from my initial sketches, as I thought it would be the most fun and creative to create in Illustrator. This also really matches the theme very well, as totem poles are very associated with the aztecs. I also really like how the shapes in this design are very simple to make in Illustrator, and I feel that the minimap will fit perfectly in the totem pole's mouth, which is what I was hoping to achieve from this initial design.