Concepted by one of our artists and me. I translated it into the engine and scripted the functionality. The concept here adopted a hollow graphic style, similar to what is seen in Borderlands and Dead Space. This was purely for aesthetic reasons.

After the initial concept, I assumed a more prominent role in concepting and developing the UI. From here, I looked to our narrative’s themes and main menu setting for inspiration. That’s when, I pivoted to the cosmos.

With my newfound direction, I worked to polish the visuals of our main menu.

The main menu points to greater theming with the UI. Soft nebulas and star clusters give shape to each button, while small nebulas appear to highlight the button interaction. These are then connected, akin to constellations.

Nebulas are born from stars, which give way to new life across galaxies. With rebirth being a prominent theme, nebulas were a fitting aesthetic.

Beyond the UI, I co-concepted and designed the space the player inhabits. Isolation, calmness, and dim lighting soothe the player into a comforting yet mysterious place. A place where one can meditate and relax between levels.

My cosmic approach influenced the aesthetic of our first level, which is visible closer to the bottom, under gameplay.

Following the initial main menu concept, I created a crude concept of what the settings menu would look like. It was going to be a hollow graphic rectangle that would contain buttons to cycle through each settings menu.

When I moved away from the holographic aesthetic for the main menu, I followed suit for settings.

I wanted the main menu buttons to stand out, so I kept the sub-menu buttons in a similar shape and form but with a unique aesthetic and behavior.

Constellations were alluded to on a grander level in the main menu, so within sub-menus, I wanted to go granular and adopt constellations made of stars rather than star clusters.

In this context, they represent icons related to the different settings, but constellations also tie into signs that some people use to prescribe strong self-characteristics from birth. With the aforementioned narrative theming, this was fitting.

I brought the nebula that was used to highlight the settings button and used it for the menu’s backdrop. However, this did not test well, as visual clarity was weak. With that, I scrapped it in favor alternative backdrop for the final iteration.

After plenty of testing and opinions from the team, this was the final iteration I designed.

I used a sparse cluster of stars as the backdrop. This allowed for further visual clarity while still being pleasing to the eye. However, I still wanted the highlight nebula from the settings button to present to further the connection between the button and menu. So, I used it to highlight each setting group name.

The credits menu follows a similar visual and programmatic structure as settings to keep things consistent between submenus for the player and me.

When clicking on a sub-menu button, the constellation will trace along the stars to form the button icon using sliders.

I created a simple script to attach to every sub-menu button and drop the necessary game objects into said script. The same principle applies to how I tackled menu navigation and the main menu buttons.

Utilizing buttons to interact with sliders instead of the player directly interacting with sliders was fundamental to improving comfort, as sliders can be finicky in VR.

Settings options involving unique mechanics led me to provide tool-tips for players with questions.

All of the menu navigation and button behaviors were scripted by me, as I have mentioned before. I started with crude programming methods that involved lines upon lines of code. Despite getting the job done, I knew there were better ways of handling my code.

I came to understand better methods of handling certain scripts, which led to more efficient code.

As seen above, this script went through a drastic transformation. Instead of showing or hiding the different settings through activation, I created a method that would allow me to cycle through each setting depending on the button pressed.

While on a level, the only prominent UI HUD element is what we call an AP Bar. This bar will fill with each aura point the player characters gather from hitting targets.

Each level is comprised of three stages that the player must pass sequentially. In order to pass a stage, one segment of the bar seen above must fully fill. One segment for stage one, two for stage two, etc.

Since each of the two avatars the player controls can earn points by hitting targets, we had difficulty deciding on one or two segmented bars.

For this initial concept, I chose to utilize a single segmented bar.

Once I had designed and scripted the initial concept, I moved ahead and created a more visually appealing version of the segmented AP Bar. From here, I had garnered opinions and tested for whether one or two bars were better for clarity.

It was quickly clear that one bar was the superior choice, but another problem that was brought up was the segments within the bar. Players wanted to fill up the entire bar during the first stage, which was unnecessary.

This led to my latest iteration.

No more segments, instead, it would be one seamless bar. I chose to keep it simple visually and have it curve downwards to hug the player’s upper vision to mitigate distraction away from the targets.

Testing proved this was a comfortable and easy to read design and position.