Precursor's Legacy is set in a fantasy world where the people use the crystals left behind by the Precursors to aid them in their every day life. Life was great until the Shadowmancer showed up and began unearthing more powerful Gemstones that give the user special abilities. Playing as Elora, you are on your way to train as a warrior for your people, when you are ambushed by the Shadowmancer. Your Mentor is injured, so you must press on without him. Be the first to find the gemstones, harness their power, and save your people from the evil Shadowmancer!
As the UI Designer on this project, I was presented with the challenge of creating a unique HUD design that was not too intrusive on the screen, but still provide all the needed info. With the story line of the crystals as a focal point, I chose to create a crystal-like Health and Stamina display, which also shows the user's currently equipped ability.
The crafting menu presented it's own challenges for me. Having never created a crafting system before, I was not completely clear on how to make it work. Once I was able to figure out the connections between what I wanted crafted, and the inventory items, it became just a matter of how to present this information to the player. I chose to go with a less is more approach, and simply added the potion to craft on the left as a button. Once it is pressed, the panel on the right displays the items needed to craft. Once the item requirement is met, the craft button becomes active.
Maintaining an aesthetic feel across all the menus is very important to ensuring the game feels like a complete project. When it came to the Pause menu, I once again kept it simple. Designing the button layout so that the buttons that lead to information panels are in the middle, and separating the Resume and Quit Game helped to force the players eyes back to the info panels.
One of the more difficult information panels was the Audio Settings. This widget seems pretty straight forward, however making sure that each slider worked as it was sliding and then also have the ability to reset, was a small challenge.
The Credits Cave allowed for each designer to display the different components of the game that they worked on. Setting this into a scroll box felt like the right way to go on this one. It also allowed each designer to attach a URL for their personal portfolio, along with a button that would load that page in a separate window.
Precursor's Legacy took a little over 4 months to create. The team of 7 designers, 3 artists, 1 sound designer did an amazing job with such a large project. In the end we all have a project that we can be proud of, and one that shows off our many talents.