UI - Final Thoughts

In addition to my main Sound & Narrative Designer role, I also took up doing all the work on the UI for !Bird; this meant designing the layout, functions, when UI elements would appear, creating the assets for it, and coding it in.

I used the UI similarly to the audio to drive home the two aesthetics of "technological" and "quirky" that I also focused on for the Sound Design. I picked fonts that fit these looks and generally designed the UI to look like it was coming from the perspective of a machine, like B1-RD. 

One of my favorite assets I made for the UI was the first-person scope filter, which I created in After Effects. I used scanlines, grain, and a red overlay to give it a "Terminator Vision" look that I thought ended up being really fun.

I encountered some interesting challenges creating the UI for the game; the biggest among these was definitely in the coding, as I had to create a somewhat complex dialogue system that would trigger UI popups on specific dialogue lines. I went through a lot of troubleshooting, but eventually I was quite happy with how the dialogue and popups turned out, and I think they all made for a much smoother and more enjoyable player experience.

Creating the UI was one of my favorite parts of working on !Bird; I do wish I could have made some of the assets more detailed, such as the profiles for the different targets that appear on the side., but overall I felt the UI ended up really selling the themes of the game while being overall fairly nice to look at and communicating important information well. I'm happy with how it turned out.