Hi everyone! I started a series of UI experiments for Video Games. A topic that usually doesn't get too much attention when talking about Game Development.
UI is usually one of the first things we see when we play video games, but contradictorily some times it's not at the same level of polishing than the rest of the game, especially obvious in Indie Games where budget and/or time don't allow to invest so much in that area. So we can see how great game design / graphics doesn't mean great UI, but usually great UI leads to a great game.
UI has lots of limitations, in terms of design and functionality, that make it harder to impress or "wow" us. So in these series I will be trying different approaches to make our UI stand out from the very beginning when we start our game. Please keep in mind these series are about experimentation, they don't need to be functional for production, although I hope they can work as inspiration or to start a discussion.
In this first experiment I worked on a Main Menu. I wanted to keep it simple but adding enough subtile behavior to attract the player's attention. I thought experimenting with a 3D menu could break some of the limitations we encounter when working on 2D. In this case is all about animations and transitions when the UI appears and displays options.
The menu was done in Blender, all animations coded and rendered in Unity.