JADE HYMER
GAMEPLAY DESIGNER
THE LAST DRAGON
A 3D adventure game where you play as a dragon, flying through caves and mountains. This project was made in Unity by a team of 3 game designers, 2 programmers, and 1 sound designer. I was responsible for level design during the first half of production, then switched roles to UI design during the second half.
UI
When I started working on the UI for Last Dragon, we were having trouble figuring out effective ways to teach the player. I took inspiration from Monster Hunter: World and started working on a HUD element that displays the controls at all times. I thought this would be particularly helpful to remind players about less-used controls like barrel rolls. First, I drew a sketch to figure out approximately how much space I wanted this to take up on the screen:
I had to add more controls to the HUD, since this game uses a lot of buttons, but my goal was to keep the size of the control display about as small as it was in the sketch. I also allocated space in the bottom right corner for button prompts to appear more prominently during the tutorial. The hearts were previously in the top right corner, but I moved them to the left because it's common for games to have health on the left, and I wanted players to find their health in the place they expect.