BLOSSOM BUDDIES
Original game; game UI design and prototype
Conceptualisation, logo and branding, UI design and art, implementation into Unity prototype
GOAL
The aim of this project was to come up with an original game concept and design its UI and branding, and later implement it into a working prototype in Unity to showcase how these UI elements worked in context of the game.
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Blossom Buddies is a cooking simulator with dating sim elements where you play as a cafe chef who befriends plants in the cafe's garden. Build rapport with them, keep them healthy and happy and receive ingredients from them to whip up tasty dishes!
Logo sketches in a variety of styles.
The logos put in context of game merchandise.
BRANDING AND LOGO DESIGN
As Blossom Buddies is a cozy and cheery game, I wanted the logo to reflect that. I started off with moodboards to inspire the direction of the design, and looked into games with a more relaxed slice of life vibe.
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I intended the logo to have a rounded aesthetic with cooking and/or floral elements to reflect its gameplay. The colour palette was also to be warm and muted to reflect a soft, comfy atmosphere.
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The final design chosen was a simpler one with a more organic typeface. The letters in the logo were staggered to have a more fun feel, and a little flower was included as minimalistic decoration in a minimalistic logo that reflected the game's nature.
STYLE GUIDE
Before I could begin on making mockups of the UI in the game's context, a style guide was necessary to establish conventions to be followed in making the assets. These would be things like the colour palette, fonts, and the appearances of the UI elements in different screens or parts of the game.
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The aim of my style guide was to be detailed and informative enough with ample examples so that anyone, even if they had no context of the game, could imagine how these UI elements worked in it.
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Like the logo, the fonts I went for were cuter, rounder, and more organic looking. I needed to strike a balance between readability and sticking with the theme, so I limited decorative fonts to the titles and screens with minimal text while using a rounded sans-serif font for body text for consistency. I also wanted to design my UI elements according to the game's theme so that they felt more integrated into the game's story and reflected its gameplay, such as having biscuits for buttons as it was set in a cafe.
A page from Blossom Buddies' style guide.
A mockup for the character dialogue screen in the game.
UI SCREEN MOCKUPS
Following the specification of the style guide, I created the UI assets and put them in the context of various key screens in the game. This was to visualise these elements before implementing them into a playable prototype, which was the final step. It also allowed me to easily find any areas for improvement since now I could see how the UI looked amongst each other and the other game assets.
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To make the UI more seamless with the game's story, I made the menus in different screens look different too. The main menu was skinned like a cafe menu as the menu would be the first thing one would see when going to a cafe, like how the main menu was the first thing one would see going into the game. On the other hand, the in-game menu was skinned as dough as the player's actions in game would primarily be cooking, and hence the dough was to signify them preparing a dish.
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As the focus of this project was on UI design, placeholder assets such as game backgrounds and 3D assets were borrowed from other games and creators. A full list of asset credits can be found here.
IMPLEMENTATION INTO PROTOTYPE
The final step was to put the UI assets into a playable prototype to have a concrete visualisation of them working in the context of the game. This was when the transitions, animations, states and feedback could really shine.
Making the prototype had its own set of challenges such as figuring out how to implement controller controls and setting up the UI properly with all the animations and effects. Many new things were learned regarding UI implementation, especially with using particle effects.
Behind the scenes of making the prototype.
AFTER-ACTION REVIEW
The main pitfall encountered in this project was overscoping. I was very ambitious with this project as I had a very clear vision of what it was going to be and was also confident I could pull it off given my experience with digital art. Doing the assets in a painterly art style took a lot of time, and I eventually realised that given the timeline it was just not feasible to do some of the things I had planned such as more detailed animation.
This led me to have to think of creative workarounds to still achieve the same feel I wanted for my work. One such example would be the dough panel in the in-game menus. I originally wanted it to roll up to hide the original contents before rolling back out with the new contents, but realised that I could not draw all those frames. Having the buttons gradually appear and disappear while the dough was being rolled would be very difficult too. Instead, I had the dough slide in and out and the elements appear in a cloud of flour dust, which still achieved the feel of being in the middle of baking something.
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Another thing I did not account for was the platform to develop the game for. I initially wanted to develop it for Nintendo Switch as I wanted to take advantage of the joycons' ability to do gesture controls to have more immersive gameplay. However, once I started prototyping I soon found out that a license was needed to develop for the Switch. This led to an overhaul of controls and thus a number of assets as the control scheme was changed to that of a controller. In retrospect, I should have done my research on platforms before deciding anything.
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Overall, it was a fun project that I really enjoyed doing and am proud of!