Star Citizen

2018 - 2022

A very ambitious project with a very wide range of tasking and skill utilization. You'll see some systems design, a lot of UX blockouts, tons of visualization concepts, which will include everything from icons and branding, to full UI asset production. Finally, some examples straight from the editor, built using CIG's proprietary node-based UI implementation tool.

Each gallery is a focus on a particular feature. Be sure to read any captions for additional details.

KIOSK ATTRACT SCREENS

These screens were designed in a mixture of Max (using existing meshes), Photoshop and Illustrator, and animated in Flash.

ASSET MANAGER

This feature was intended to allow players to locate and review information about any item they owned, in any inventory at any location in the game. Executing involved a mix of 3D icon visualization, UI design, and UX design for managing thousands of items, across hundreds of locations, and within multiple layers of nested containers.

SHOP UI

After a few cycles of iteration, we landed on this structure. I authored a neutrally-designed version of our base shop UI in our implementation tool, and utilized our style sheet system to design dozens of new, unique styles directly in the tool itself, to represent all the different store brands in the game universe. Every shop you see runs on the same bones.

Frontend UI

The player's first interaction with the product. I want to project a sense of scale to match the size of the game, so lots of negative space was used, letting the game visuals do all of the talking. On this screen you can manage your social lists, and launch your party into different parts of the universe.

SHIP VFX VISUAL CONCEPT

I'd done a bunch of assets production for some of the VFX artists at a previous project, but this was the first time I'd been asked to conceptualize a visual effect from scratch. It was a lot of fun, and it would be fun to do more of this work in the future. I designed this back in 2018, and the video I captured in this carousel was from 2026, so it's nice to see how close it still is (on an extended project like Star Citizen, almost everything changes over time).

Commodity Kiosk UX/UI

There was (is?) an ongoing discussion about how cargo gets moved from one location to the other in Star Citizen. This was an exploration of a system that allowed the process to be automated by NPCs, instead of manually done by players. While the automation never made it in, the general structure of this UX/UI is in game today.

CARGO MANAGEMENT GREYBOX

There was exploration regarding turning cargo itself into a gameplay opportunity. What if you had delicate goods, that required certain types of crates, or cargo holds? You'd need some way to have oversight of everything on your ship. With the ability to put any item in any crate, and crates into bigger crates, tracking the hierarchical location and status of everything was a challenge.

BOUNTY HUNTING SYSTEMs/UX

Bounty hunting has been very popular in Star Citizen, and had generated a lot of feedback requesting an experience for bounty hunters more robust than simply flying to the target's waypoint and killing them. I worked closely with a talented systems designer to figure out a way to bring the feeling of tracking evasive prey through the UX and UI.

Command interface ui

While some systems were exposed in the cockpit, there had never been any centralized UI to oversee and manage all the systems available on your ship. This was an exploration into a solution that was flexible enough to manage simple systems like lighting, up to complex systems like internal security permissions.

SCANNING HUD

A task came in to help visualize a more robust form of scanning, to turn the simple button-press into a dedicated gameplay role on board a large class of ship. In this UI, the scanner can dig down and find detailed information about the ship, its equipment, and even the crew.

Prison Mining UI concepts

It's a rite of passage to accidentally find yourself with a ten hour prison sentence at Klescher. This was an exploration of what a sickeningly upbeat correctional facility corporation might have as their inmate interface for managing their mining excursions.

MISSION MANAGER UX

As more content was added to the missions system, it became clear that a more extensive solution was required for browsing, searching and filtering through posted missions.

MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS

Here are several items with one-off designs, or smaller scope tasks on the Star Citizen project.