Trailer edited by Julie Toich, the team's illustrator/concept artist. Music created by Jimmie Harkins, programmer and resident music maker.
Riptide is an open-world sea exploration game that encourages users to uncover the environment while collecting loot, fighting monsters, and upgrading gear. It was developed for Android phones with support from RIT's Magic Makers Program. Over the course of three months, six team members worked on the game to create a minimum viable product.
As the UI/UX designer of the team, I was responsible for creating the layouts and assets for Riptide's screens. I worked closely with one of the programmers who implemented my designs into Unity. The picture above on the left is the first conceptualization I did for the game's UX. To the right are the low-fidelity wireframes.
This is what the wireframes looked like at the mid-fidelity part of the process. At this point, typefaces and colors had been roughly picked and implemented, but most of the content is filler.
Before the wireframes hit high-fidelity, the team decided to change from portrait mode to landscape would encourage the exploratory nature of our game better. The programmer and I were familiar enough with our UX/UI plans at this point to quickly create wireframes that would reflect this change. Because of our attentiveness, this switch the team thought would set us back a couple of weeks only took one week to implement.
Above are a few of the assets that Riptide needed. With the exception of the status effect icons and background scenes, I created all of the assets featured in the game. There was initially experimentation with a couple of different styles, but the team settled on a simpler vector look with bold outlines to create an approachable feel that fit with our target demographic.
Once the UI and UX were finalized, I tackled Riptide's logo. While initially, it was going in a more typographic direction, the sketches ended up looking too serious and didn't fit the game. Since there aren't any people portrayed in Riptide, the ship is the main character in a sense. As a result, the wheel became the focus. It also became clear that a more imagery-driven mark would better fit the light but adventurous feel. Thus the final logo (on the right) was created.
The game is now live on the Google Play Store.