Sims Carnival SNAP CITY

Hi, welcome to my UI design page. This is the only game and experience I have had with UI. I really did not know what to expect. All I knew was that it was a casual game, sims relate, and that, they needed someone extremely fast with Illustrator and with an illustration background. I remember that first week felt like I had come to work naked, but as time progressed and I got to know just how awesome and helpful the team was, it made this experience very comfortable and natural feeling. So this was my journey into the world of UI design, which I can proudly say I am happy with.

SNAP CITY UI DESIGN

This was the funnest part to the whole UI experience. By this point I had been cranking out UI for a good three and a half months for like 8-12 hours a day, and I was itching to do somethign illustrative again; so, this couldn't have come at a better time. There wasn't much time, so I had to rough out a bunch of ideas quickly. I had actually completed a menu which was very similar tot he middle piece, but when marketing came back with the finalized "SNAP CITY" Logo, I was in a little trouble because originally I was going to design the title to fit on the curved road apporoaching from the right. But with 6 hours to go, I reluctantly scrapped the whole foreground and came up with the road dipping and curving into the foreground which I am so much happier with because it made me get rid of the ugly little car and come up with something a bit more edgy. I am pretty happy with the way it turned out.

This is our version of a Meta Map. Click on a chunk of color to play that level. We really wanted to do a different sort of map, not some birds eye view, connect the dots map, but somethign viually more stimulating and satisfying once you complete it. A reward of some sort in itself. So I came up with this idea of a city scape. Each colored piece would be a stage within the level. You would know if you've completed the stage when it appeared in full color. Quick and easy to read each time you start the game. This would have been really great to take to a completion, but I had to complete the rest of the UI. Instead, it was handed off to Patrick Roth, my buddy, who was creating all the building assets. I could not have imagined a more polished look. It looks awesome. I was very happy with team work involved.

So the HUD was my very frist time desiging any kind of UI. My very first designs were horrible. Big, Chunky, took up way to much of the visible play area. Even now when I look at the final HUD I wish I could go back and just streamline it even more. I would like to have given the player even more visible gaming area. Overall though, this was an amazing experience and process. I like looking back and seeing where it started and how it ended. Art is always amazing like that, you neve know what the end result is gonna look like until you get there.

This being my very first time creating UI of any kind was pretty overwhelming when I realized how many menus needed to be created for just a casual game. Making sure there was a consistancy from the smallest to the largest menus. Here are examples of my process. From a final shot of what my options menu became to where I started. There was one regret though. I wish I had a little more time to have truly blended the main menu's palette and a bit of the form more with these UI's. Never the less I was very happy with the look and feel of the UI's for the most part.

These are some of the icons I had to come up with. I learned that creating icons that could be universally read, made being artistically unique very difficult at times. In the end, the icons usually ended up being the most obvious image you could think of. I learned a whole lot thought.



ALL IMAGES ON THIS SITE IS PROPERTY OF EA GAMES SIMS