Pizzapocalypse

As the game was themed around a pizza delivery man, I wanted to reflect this delivery aspect in the victory screen, by showing a receipt with the final scores on top of it, and a randomly picked customer review somewhere in the design as well.

Animating the UI was also very fun, as I wanted the user to interact with the receipt like they do in real life. The game shows the receipt partially at first, after which it moves upwards by user input. By doing this I managed to create an immersive feeling interface that still keeps the joy of the pizza delivery even after gameplay.

This idea of bringing the game into the UI was a fun creative challenge that I really enjoyed, as it required me to think in different ways I never had before.

When gameplay design was figured out, I started to work on designs for the HUD. Designers had given me a list of everything that would need to be displayed on the HUD, and so I got to work and made multiple ideas. This was then run by the leads who approved it. This is where implementation started.

Later on, an FPS counter got added, which was easy to add in-engine because of the modularity I had created when implementing the UI.

Animations were pretty simple here, as only a transition to and from the pause menu was required.

The fun thing about making settings menus is that it's a combination of designing UI, and doing technical UI implementation. This mix made it incredibly exciting for me to work on this.

The settings menu had to be very modular, which is something I strived for. By doing this, adding different types of settings was mostly copy-pasting work. This saved me a lot of time, which allowed me to spend more time on bugfixing.

Because I saw that the settings menus were often neglected in student games like this, I wanted to take the polish to the next level. Therefore, I made sure to put all sorts of small animations in the settings menu, to make the game feel just that little bit more satisfying.

One of the main things I wanted to achieve with the main menu and pause menu was 'less is more'. I wanted the information behind the UI to be visible. For the main menu this was because we were going to have a 3D background that would be the main attraction on the screen. For the pause menu, I found it important to show the paused gameplay, to give the player some feed-forward for when they would un-pause.

This simplicity made the menus quite standard when compared to other games, which was okay. Again, for the main menu, the 3D environment was the main attraction, so I did not see anything to worry about. I did use animations to make the menu more alive, both when there were transitions and when idle.

On the right you can see a few early designs in Figma of the main menu (top) and pause menu (bottom).