Staff Presentation #6 – GUI Artist

Hi, I’m Grib, UI artist on Blood Bowl II.

My job is to transform the thousands of ideas of the game designer into a language that is easily accessible to all future Blood Bowl II players, while taking into account the constraints of implementation. All in all, that means creating the full GUI of the game… while praying to Nuffle that it works!

The underlying philosophy is something that is ergonomic, immersive and fun.

There are several steps in the creation of the GUI, but the key is the clarity of information in all conditions.

This doesn’t simply mean creating icons and logos, transcribing the cards of the board game, creating portraits or even decorating the menus because it’s cool; it means bringing together a wealth of information so that the player can have fun in a world that is intuitive and that respects the original!

Part of my job process can be summarized by these few points:

Outline of graphic codes

Exchanges on game design

Assessment of needs and constraints

Prototype

Colour mock-ups linked to outline of graphic codes

Integration

Feedback by QA dept.

Plenty of toing and froing in order to maximize player comfort

Quite often, final validation does not come before the following have given their input: project manager, game designer, art director, the person in charge of IP, Cyanide managers, Games Workshop and the publisher, who together would represent a Blood Bowl team that was capable of making any Chaos team think twice!

Of course, I haven’t gone into detail because we could still talk about typography, animations, illustrations … but I have an Orc team to test on some cuddly elves;)

Waaagh!!