StarCitizen:User Interface
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The User interface, the UI, in Star Citizen and Squadron 42 needs to supports the story and feel part of the world rather than being stuck to the players monitor. It's about immersion.
Cloud Imperium Games ultimate goal is to create an UI that wouldn’t look out of place in a sci-fi movie, even working with Hollywood concept artists to achieve something that will really stand out.<ref name=":0">The Importance of UI in Star Citizen, magazine.artstation.com, October 29, 2020</ref>
All the locations each have their own look, and a unique UI style.<ref name=":0" />
Process
Inspired by the environment concept art and back story, CIG creates a mood board as a starting point for the UI style: a widespread range of images to help trigger ideas, screenshots from movies, artwork, graphic design and even abstract shapes and colours. Using the favourite parts of the mood board, the team then sketches a selection of rough concepts for what the UI could look like, spending less than a day on each, so as to explore a range of ideas rather than focusing too early. One there are a few concepts to choose from, the team seats down with the art director to pick the favourite, and uses this as a starting point for the visual target. This is essentially a polished concept image sums up the look and feel for the UI style. They make sure that the UI on the visual target feels like it’s part of the world – seeing it in a scene with dusty fingerprints, old school monitor effects and light glares tells much more of a story than just seeing it on a flat black background. Behind the flat UI, a 3D background can be added to give the scene much more depth. When the team is happy with the look, they create a short style guide showing the important colours, fonts and layout rules, ready to make the real in-game screens.<ref name=":0" />
For building interactive screens ingame, CIG has an in-house tool which allows non-UI people to build their own screens, without being slowed down by lack of visuals. This means that while the UI team is figuring out the look, the missions team can set up functional, but ugly versions of the screens in the game. The UI team also has its own designers and coders who tackle the more complicated screens.<ref name=":0" />
The next stage is to combine the visual style with the functional screens and get them into the level. This involves the UI artists saving out any artwork ready to put into the game, advising the game designers, and getting hands-on in the game engine where necessary to pull everything together.<ref name=":0" />
Once they have the screens ingame, if the visuals felt a bit too static, the team spends some time working out how to add life to the 3D background. They decide whether to use a movie, a flipbook, or real 3D elements, working out what would look good, but wouldn’t take too long to create, or slow the game down. It could be a pre-rendered background image, with some small hand-animated sections to make it feel more alive, but still run fast.<ref name=":0" />
Once the UI is complete, the 3D artists add the screens to the level with lighting, materials, dirt and grime to make them feel like they really fit into the prison environment. Finally, the team spends a lot of time testing, tweaking and fixing to make sure everything works as expected, before shipping it out to the players in the next version of Star Citizen.<ref name=":0" />
It’s important on a big project to look back and work out what could do better next time, which allows for example to discovered lots of things to improve by planning and cross-team communication. This can help figure out new ways to re-use the UI so that things get up and running more quickly in future.<ref name=":0" />