Grimstone Valley's many menus were the first parts of the game's user interface I tackled. The design and style I decided on here would lay the foundation for the rest of the game's UI.

I created the game's splash screen, main menu, options, pause menus, and death screen. This involved outlining the user experience flow for the entire game, creating art assets and sprite sheets, implementing art into Unity, animating various UI elements, and coding extra functionality where needed.

• > Menu Breakdown

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Maria's journal is a major component of Grimstone Valley, both in terms of gameplay and narrative. After the game's menus, I would consider the journal to be one of my biggest UI contributions.

The journal grants the player free access to a lot of information; they can read up on the enemies they've encountered, examine their collected notes and souvenirs, or view current objectives.

I created many of the journal's art assets, aside from the collectible and portrait illustrations, which were drawn by Connor Dunn. I was also in charge of animating and setting up the functionality of the journal's many buttons in Unity.

• > Journal Breakdown

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Grimstone Valley has three main levels: the Town, the Railyard, and the Tunnels, the tutorial level. To travel between these, players use the level select menu that can be found in the Hub.

A bulletin-style bounty board was a concept the team was thinking about from nearly the beginning of development, which is where the inspiration to style the level select menu as a map came from. New levels, as they're unlocked, appear on the map as colored illustrations, indicating that they're now interactable. When the player mouses over a level, they can also see the number of notes and items they've collected out of that level's total.

I was tasked with importing the illustrations created by Connor Dunn into Unity, where I also set up all UI animation and functionality.

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While Grimstone Valley's HUD is fairly minimal, it is certainly no less important. In creating the HUD, I worked closely with design to decide what information it was most important for the player to have easy access to as well as how to best communicate this information.

This involved creating the player and enemy health bars, as well as integrating these new visuals into the existing player and enemy health scripts. I also designed the various interactions prompts and markers seen throughout the game.

• > HUD Breakdown

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One of the main ways Grimstone Valley conveys its story is through conversations with NPCs, which meant that getting the dialogue UI right was important.

The dialogue UI displays a portrait of both the player and the character they're speaking to, with the active speaker's portrait highlighted. I took a lot of inspiration from Hades and other RPGs while drafting the early concepts.

There were initially plans for a very robust dialogue system, including branching paths, player choices, and the ability to go through conversations multiple times. I created several mock-ups of what this more complex dialogue interface would look like, but ultimately these plans were scaled back.

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Along with dialogue, much of Grimstone Valley's worldbuilding is done through the optional notes and collectibles that can be found throughout the game's three levels.

Upon picking up one of these collectibles, the player is shown an illustration of the item, created by Connor Dunn, accompanied by some text. For souvenirs, that text would be a short flavor text description of the object; for notes, it would display the document's full text.

In Unity, I created the enter/exit animations, added the functionality to support multi-page notes, and integrated the new UI into our existing collectible system.

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Uncover the weasel hiding among your band of ferrets in the mobile port of the Ferret Out board game, by R&R Games.

As the primary user interface designer and 2D artist, I was tasked with designing the user experience flow, creating and importing art assets, and animating UI elements in Unity. I also had to ensure that the game's UI could account for a variety of device aspect ratios and orientations as well as support anywhere from two to eight players.

• > Ferret Out UI Breakdown

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