I would consider Maria's journal to be one of my biggest user interface contributions to Grimstone Valley, as well as one of the additions I'm most proud of.

The player can freely access the journal at any point in the game, and its many pages contain both relevant gameplay information and a trove of narrative worldbuilding and flavor text. The player can review their current level objectives, gain additional insight on the friends and foes they've encountered, view the notes and souvenirs they've collect throughout their journey, read Maria's personal diary entries, and rewatch the game's cutscenes.

I was responsible for designing the journal's overall layout and navigation flow, creating and importing many of the art assets, animating the journal's buttons in Unity, and working closely with our programmer to ensure everything functioned as intended.

In addition to being displayed in the journal, the player's current level objective is also included in game's HUD. Players being confused on what to do or where to go was an issue we ran into pretty frequently in our early playtests, so clearly communicating this information to the player in an accessible way was crucial.

The player can move the mouse into the top left corner of the screen to reveal their current objective. Once they complete an objective, the old objective is crossed out and a new one is written in. This, along with additional sound effects, helps communicate to the player that something important has changed.

As an added touch, the player can also click on the HUD objective page. This takes the player to the main page of the journal, which displays a full list of the level's active and completed objectives.