Major Project - Pre-Production and Production

In starting a project as grand as this, I came into the year with a premade engine to work from, a rhythm-based shooter where the main objective is to "shoot to the beat".

With that, I came into this year with the following goal; to create a maximalist user interface that embodies the style of musical iconography while still being functional, inbuing a sense of satisfaction in using it - inspired by Atlus's use of maximalism, in games such as Persona 5 and Metaphor: ReFantazio.

I began with assembling a Miro Board. I used this to gather together examples as to different interfaces convey, spanning interfaces that had both minimalist and maximalist interfaces. I then did a Post-It Investigation for them,

I then took this further by establishing a set of Player Personas, giving me insight to the different types of players and what accommodations they may need.

From here, I additionally created Flow-Charts, all of which helped me to determine just what I wanted in each interface - allowing me to begin planning effectively for prototyping, all the while using what I had learned from the Post-It Investigations to establish a flow that felt concise without wasting the players time.

On the side, I researched the style of my game, and what form it could take. Taking inspiration from posters of different generations, I researched the different iconographical feats of each generation, for example, the 60's psychadelic stretching words across different objects, or the 2000s blend of real life subjects and gritty iconography.

I also made an effort to research games that attempted to blend this style themselves. The strongest example I found was The Artful Escape, to which I noted it's ability to contain dynamic, band-inspired logos while maintaining stylistic consistency between interfaces, with descriptive font being the same, for example.

Finally, I created a schedule within Notion. This was with the purpose of helping me to fully break down what I had to do, now that I knew what interfaces I wanted to make. I decided that I would not touch Unreal until late November, as I wanted to ensure I could make any functionality-related iterations within the comfort of Figma over having to remake the code of an entire interface in Unreal, ensuring I have a steady foundation to work from.

I found Notion to be a reliable tool, due to it's ability to assign tasks by priority, date and grouping, which made organization very easy. However, I shot too high with the tasks I initally gave myself, expecting far more than I had.

In December 2024, however, I fell behind my schedule by a few weeks. This was due to the tight turnarounds I gave myself, for example, giving myself a week for the pause menu prototype when in actuality, due to the amount of iteration I had to do upon it from feedback, I ended up spending over three weeks on it. To remedy this, I set myself a new deadline; giving myself two weeks for every interface, and giving myself the entirety of April as a buffer period. This ended up benefiting me in the long run, as due to personal reasons, I fell behind and was able to catch up to tasks due to what April granted me in reprieve. Additionally, come January, I began setting specific days for tasks, which allowed me to work around my busy work schedule at the time to focus on chipping away at this.