Damian Harrop
Overview
Team
Chaos Crew
Role
UI Technical Designer
Through Rust is a tactical turn based RPG set in the distant year 3027 in a Cyberpunk/Victorian style British Empire. The player takes the role of Angel, a soul in a robot police suit working to keep her soul alive in the Heaven Mainframe. While going through the game, Angel struggles to recall who she was before death, and must recall who she is while also fighting against growing rebellion forces.
UI Planning
This game was part of the our senior capstone in college, and I was brought onto the team in the second semester after games were cut and teams were expanded. Due to this, the game already had UI and levels set, so as I was getting familiar with the game, I started planning on how we could change the UI since the team prior to this did not have a dedicated UI/UX designer.
My main concerns were being able to add all the information we needed in the gameplay screen since there was a lot of information regarding what the player could do with abilities, memories active, health, etc. I had not worked on a game of this genre before, so it was a good challenge to try and see how I could try and make the UI better. I also thought it would be a good idea to have text boxes and text change colors based on who is talking, to make it easier to see that a different character is talking. I took screenshots of the game and did some overpainting in Clip Studio Paint, and set up mockups in Figma to show the different parts to the rest of the team.
UI Iterations
Over the coming weeks, there was a lot of UI iteration as we added more abilities, and more things for the player to do in the game. There was also the addition of having multiple player characters in a level, and trying to add all of that UI into the main level screen became a challenge of making something look nice and also being readable.
Final Product
Throughout the entire development process, there was a lot of iteration on the gameplay screen as we tried to balance all the different mechanics and information to the player. There was also a struggle with readability, especially on the pause menu. To fix the issue with the pause menus, we found a program on the asset store that had a bunch of UI post processing effects, including a blur tool. We added that to the project so that the gameplay screen would be blurred out to allow for easier reading on the pause menus. We also had unique text box colors for all characters, which extended to the memory maps of playable characters such as Oliver and Thomasine.
