GUI design for Derelict Void

I have not been writing so much in my journal recently because I have been working on game development (!). I'm part of Stirling Games - a team of 8, spread out across the world (Canada, Germany, Israel, Spain, and the United States), and we're making the most out of 2020 and the working-from-home-because-of-a-pandemic situation by pushing towards a release early next year. The title is Derelict Void, and it may pique your interest if you like the following concepts together: rogue-like (or "rogue lite") + colony simulator + spaaaaaace

Earlier this year my involvement with Stirling Games was tangential, making placeholder 2D assets for a playable demo of Derelict Void. Then I got brought into the team more officially to help out with designing the graphic user interface (GUI) of the game. I have not designed GUIs for games before but I figured I might have the pieces to make it work: I love making diagrams of everything, I used to do research on visual perception, I am familiar with talking to team members from various domains. So I decided to roll with it.

My GUI design process so far has looked like this: First, I gather requirements from the game designers. Then I start drawing pen-on-paper wireframe sketches...

Once I have enough evidence that the concept is roughly captured, I move onto slightly higher-fidelity interaction design sketches.

Once the interaction ideas are more or less finalized (of course there's always iteration, so I'm aiming for something like 80% certainty that we're in the ballpark of where we want to be), I move onto making mockups that involve fancier colors and typefaces...

Then I communicate my ideas of how things should work to the engineer, the engineer communicates the sprite requirements to me, I make the sprites, and then the engineer makes the sprites come to life!

Hopefully you will get to see the full extent of my work in a few months! In case you feel so inclined to follow the progress of Stirling Games and the development of Derelict Void... there are couple things you can do right now:

• Follow us on twitter for announcements
• Join the Derelict Void community Discord
• Go check out our website
• Support us on Kickstarter (we launch on November 18!)