UI/UX Case Study
Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, After Effects CC
I chose to make a new fictional character named Vlad for this concept. In terms of lore, I thought it would be fun to make a counterpart to Zarya as an old war buddy. In contrast to Zarya, Vlad wouldn’t be a tank; instead, he was designed to be a high-risk, high-reward, mid-range damage dealer. In my design, his armament features a particle cannon and graviton technology that is similar to Zarya's abilities.
Animated cooldown example in the HUD
Vlad's abilities and weapon icons are inspired by the Particle Cannon and Particle Barrier technology featured in Zarya's abilities. I re-used the generic passive ability icon for shield regeneration (this exists in the game). I used this mood-board to study Zarya closely and pick up visual guidelines for my new character concept
To gain full understanding of how to build new character abilities from scratch, I had to carefully observe how the UI elements reacted when a player uses an ability. Thankfully, Overwatch features a cinematic mode that allows you to turn off all UI elements. I used this feature to capture images without the HUD and proceeded to re-create it from scratch.
Visual feedback for the player to target enemies with Graviton Shackle
Visual feedback for the player to indicate that enemies are affected by Graviton Shackle
This flowchart represents my early thought process for mapping out new abilities for this new fictional character from scratch and how that could relate to UI elements in the HUD.
