EVERDELL
On Everdell, my responsibilities included UI/UX design, environment art, and art direction. For the interface on this project, I aimed for a more skeuomorphic UI that leaned into hand painted frame elements that complimented the rich illustration style of the original board game.
UI/UX GrAy-box
Before exploring the visual design for Everdell, I started with simple gray-box assets for rapid iteration on the overall game layout. This allowed the team to get a sense for what the right balance of visual hierarchy and choose an approach that was best for the product. These low fidelity mockups also provided a framework for the UI art exploration allowing me to focus on aesthetics.
This interactive mockup was made to quickly test the playmat layout, set up the camera angle, and get a feel for different approaches to the UI/UX. Blocking the scene out with simple gray-box graphics in engine helps tremendously when setting up the final environment assets and hi-fi UI. It also gave us a feel for user flows and transitions so that we could quickly identify what was working and what wasn’t.
After landing on a layout that the team was happy with we began skinning the gray-box. To enliven the experience we took a hybrid 2D/3D approach to the UI with animated characters that you drag out into the game board to perform actions. Much of the UI on the gameboard was also composed of skeuomorphic 3D elements to further push immersion. We still wanted familiar elements from the original board game, so certain elements such as the cards were presented in a flat 2D format to avoid too much abstraction of core game components.
My approach to the game board environment was to make it feel like you were peering into the forest, observing the hidden world of the inhabitants of Everdell. The card illustrations in Everdell are beautifully painted in an impressionistic art style that is full of energy and color. My goal was to achieve that same look in the 3D assets by hand painting all of the textures and using as little real-time lighting as necessary.
ENVIRONMENT ART
Simple shaded view of the 3D environment
Texture and lighting using the Eevee renderer in Blender
The mesh had to be as optimized as possible to run well on mobile platforms
Textures where shared as much as possible, but I decided to create a large 4k texture for the main playmat area to achieve a hand painted art style
