Dine N’ Bash - Main Menu UI Iteration

Project Specs

Type of Project: Academic Team

  • 4 Designers

  • 6 Engineers

Role: UI/UX Designer

Length of Project: 8 Months

Overview

Dine N’ Bash is a top-down time management game where the player is tasked to deliver food to customers in a Tavern. The twist is that when customers aren’t delivered their food in time, they throw things at the customer making it a pseudo-bullet hell.

Planning

Main Menu Reference - Credits to Overcooked!

The Initial Plan was to create an Immersive Diegetic UI that brings the player into the Tavern they wait tables for. The shadows of customers would cast across the menu as they walked by.

The hover states would have circles being drawn over the desired menu option.

Problems with v1

  • The Menu Options weren’t reading as buttons and so people didn’t understand how to interact with the menu.

  • The Menu required too many custom assets to look good. We did not have an artist, 2 designers at the time, 4 engineers.

  • Too heavy on animations, our tech team didn’t have an animation system in our custom engine at the time.

Solution:

  • Simplify, simplify, simplify

    • Use Squares for buttons, more intuitively reads as a button.

    • Limit animations to slide ins and scaling, easier to animate, just uses lerps

    • Use assets from the pack we were already using. Visual cohesion and fills in gaps of having no artists.