Lead UI Designer
UI Design, Art and Engineering
GOALS:
- Add new features to the game while complementing the art style already established.
- Follow the user flows already established so that any new features worked well with what players already knew.
- Polish and update old screens with new content.
XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is an expansion to XCOM 2 that almost adds more content than the base game shipped with.
One of the big additions to WOTC was the Covert Ops mechanic. We wanted the player to be able to queue up passive missions that could grant more rewards and develop the narrative of the new factions further. We needed the screens to look unique and all feel like part of the same family of designs without deviating too far from the rest of the UI style.
Soldiers from the new factions in WOTC have more abilities than standard XCOM soldiers. We needed to make an ability select screen that could accommodate all these new possibilities but not be too drastically different from what players where familiar with when promoting base soldiers. This design scaled to all classes even when design changed abilities and added the functionality to retrain base soldiers with more abilities.
Since the Chosen were a major addition to WOTC we added a screen to the end of the month flow of screens the player gets in X2 that informs them of how they are doing. We wanted the Chosen Activity screen to showcase the Chosen and also give the player enough information about what the Chosen were planing for the next month, so that the player could try and mitigate any threat.
We also highlighted each Chosen the first time you encounter them in tactical. This sequence was inspired by Shadow of Mordor. Since everything about the Chosen changes based on a playthrough of the game it was important to call out their strengths and weaknesses.
One of the biggest changes to tactical in WOTC was the addition of new weapon types for the different faction soldiers. The Reapers are snipers and we really wanted to play up the stealth aspect of their abilities. I worked with a technical artist to create the lens distortion and scan line effects for all the reaper modes.
The Propaganda Poster creator in WOTC was a challenge to get all the rendering to work like we wanted, but even more of a challenge to get the UX right. We wanted it to work on both PC and consoles. We also spent time trying to keep the options for each element of the poster from being too deep in the screen flow. We applied some concepts from soldier customization so that the navigation would feel similar the player. We were able to create a successful standalone demo that helped with the marketing push before the release of WOTC.
Following the release of WOTC a small group of team members put together the Tactical Legacy Pack. One of the major features of this expansion was the Legacy Operations. This was a quick way to play XCOM without the strategy layer. We streamlined the game flow and gave the player smaller meaningful choices between combat missions. We also gated some content behind completion of each operation to reward players for playing through this content.
In addition to designing all the screens for WOTC, working on the user experience and doing a significant amount of UI engineering, I also created all the logos for the different factions in the game. To add variety for the player on subsequent playthroughs we actually made each faction logo randomly design itself. Each logo was made of pieces that could work together, each piece would then randomly assemble and then store its layout for the rest of that playthrough. The logo sheets above show the iteration process for arriving at the final logo and begin to hint at the variation that can be created. The general logo for the Chosen did not change but each Chosen, the Assassin, the Hunter and the Warlock had procedurally generated symbols to go along with their procedurally generated names.