Low Poly Pixel UI
Background
There is a mass market for pixel art games, especially in 2020 a lot of games were using pixelated graphics both in UI and Gameplay because, in 3D environment, pixelated graphics are easy to
model and have better performance on mobile devices than the hi-poly models.
Motivation
There are very few pixel art UI assets available on Unity Asset-Store so, I decided to build one to upload on the asset-store.
Research
The idea was to design a generic GUI kit so that it can be used for different games. And in order to do that, there are few questions which i thought are important to answer :
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What are the key UI elements that most of the games have?
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What are the most common screens that most of the games contain?
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Who are the users? and what they want ?
Now the next thing was how to answer these questions ?
In formal research one of the method for collecting data and to build knowledge is to look at "historic data" and case studies.
So, I started to look at UI of games in different genres to make sure the project covers all the genres because the purpose was to achieve generalization.In addition to that, I used my 3 years of game development experience.
Here we Go! we have some findings now!
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What are the key UI elements that most of the games have?
Some of the findings are obvious but sometimes it is important to state the obvious :
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Buttons
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sliders
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dialog Boxes
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Loading bar
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Menu bars
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stars
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coins
2. What are the most common screens that most of the games contain?
Most of the games have following screens:
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Splash Screen
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Main Menu
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Gameplay
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Settings
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Level select screen
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Shop Screen
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LeaderBoard
3. Who are the users? and what they want ?
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Primary users will be individual Game developers looking for a complete set of User Interface kit to use in their projects.
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Most of them are able to handle basic editing in Adobe photoshop other software are less popular in developers such as adobe illustrator.
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Need UI which can be easily modified.
DESIGN
Based on the requirements and research above i started designing screens in Adobe Photoshop.
View Asset On Unity Assetstore : http://u3d.as/1TQk
Conclusion
The aim of this project was to build a generic UI system to use in pixelated art style games for mobile devices, which was achieved by conducting a small amount of research on user's needs and similar existing systems. The most important thing which played a key role in success of this project was identifying the user needs,
The response received is promising as after sometime the project was selected by unity assetstore in top 100 assets in global game jam in asia specific region.However, there is still a lot of room for improvements, and in future work more work is needed to achieve a truly generic UI system.
