League Progression was a feature that was added into the game early in soft launch as a way to make the player’s progression through the ranks of the game more clear and rewarding. We wanted to provide an environment where players could see the path in front of them so they may make both short and long term goals.
The feature required a huge collaborative effort with multiple UI artists working together to create designs that worked together in the proper hierarchy as well as setting new standards for environment HUD displays and rank progression.
My part in this enormous feature was all of the HUD elements, both in their designs and implementation. The HUD pieces needed to be legible but not come too forward on the screen, and be a logical housing for the gameplay information and pieces in our more material-focused UI style. In addition, I worked to develop the faction progress bars for this progression.
In an effort to surface more interesting store offers to players, the PM on the team developed an offer model that was based on a progression of unlocking better and better deals. To support this model, we needed layouts that better communicated to players the format of the offers as well as the value proposition for continuing to invest in the offers.
Developing this feature introduced opportunity for multiple upgrades to the general UI toolkit. One of the biggest of these opportunities was to create a more robust modal system that allowed us to organize information in a sectioned way.
During the process of developing this feature, I designed updated to the base modal aesthetics and structure to create a more polished looking design. Since modals are used all over in the meta, this instantly upgraded the visual fidelity of the project. Once that had been upgraded, I designed the side navigation format for extra large modals if they needed to house a lot of information.
Once these pieces were designed and implemented, I utilized the UX for this feature as well as toolkit pieces to make layouts that sectioned information to the player in easy to read and digest formats.
In an effort to increase engagement with our players, we developed a daily reward feature to encourage players to return to the game every day. This feature needed to both pop up in the base meta upon logging in, as well as be visible and accessible elsewhere in the UI.
In designing this feature, we segmented the rewards in weekly “milestone” formats as well as the full time period. It was important for the design to communicate forward progress on a short and longer timeline to encourage players to see the rewards as a good progression.
As part of the Campaign Map V2 work, the UI needed an overhaul to the unified UI style, as well as to compliment the new and simplified UX design. The UI was intended to be simple, and somewhat reminiscent of older military HUD readouts. The simplicity was to help highlight the art, and to keep the busier UIs from being overwhelming to the player.
The UI for this feature needed to be simple so as to not overwhelm all the information to the player, as well as to make it flexible enough to hold new event-specific art.
Settings menu needed better organization of interact-able elements and links out of the game. New toggles were created to better represent controls the player can adjust.
The visual theme for this event type was Carnival Games. The UI sought to really immerse the player in the theme for the event by going all out on the UI panels and decorations to re-enforce the theme across the event UI. I worked with PM and GD during brainstorming for the themeing and then with PM and Art during concepting and all the way up to final art approval.
King of the Hill is an event type where the player plays a series of levels in order to claim the top spot on the event map. Once another player makes it to the top, they are booted, and will have to repeat in order to gain that spot again. Being "king" grants players better prizes depending on how long they are in that position. The visual theme for bubble mania was "rainbow" and "king" and the UI I created was intended to be as lightweight as possible while also being distinctly tied to this event. I also worked with art to make sure the art and UI assets worked together well.
In order to keep this new feature as lightweight as possible, most of the UI for this feature utilized assets already in the game. New UI assets included some icons as well as the Building Mastery book.
