Pixel Galaxy
UI and Color design for a classic arcade shooter - Unity, Photoshop, After Effects
Responsible for UI design, color palette design, promotional art, and intro animation.
Pixel Galaxy was created by Serenity Forge.
Available now on Steam
SELECTION
INDIE ARCADE:
COAST TO COAST
2016
A game with an aesthetic based completely on squares, Pixel Galaxy was a fun design challenge. A majority of the 'art direction' came from finding communicative color palettes, and creating a seamless, intuative UI. I was also responsible for creating all of the promotional art used for the game including Steam achievements and various banners. I also created the introductory animation for the game.
When designing the UI for Pixel Galaxy, I decided that it needed to look like an interface one would see on a game in an old arcade cabinet. This meant using large text, menus that take up the entire screen, and using very few inputs to navigate the UI. WIth these constraints I still had to balance the player's access to all the necessary data, and displaying information in a cohesive manner.
Another contraint I imposed on myself for this design but the limited use of graphics. Text, background rectangles, and the white pixel icon were the only visual elements I had at my disposal, forcing me to find creative ways to organize these elements to display the various types of content in each screen.
Color choices in the UI too were limited because I wanted the entire menu to be able to change color with whatever difficulty you had selected. This made the menu itself feel more fun and interactive, like it was part of the game. But it also forced me to use a very simple color language in the UI that could easily be transfered to several color schemes.
As far as creating the color schemes for the gameplay itself, it was an interesting but very visually rewarding excersise. Every color scheme not only needed to be unique from the others, but also had to be able to 'hue shift'. During the game, each color scheme can conceivably shift into any other set of hues. Thus a color scheme became not a hue language, but a color relationship, value, and saturation language.
There is a unique color scheme for each of the twenty bosses, as well as several others that lend differnet elements to the gameplay. For example, in Ghost mode, the enemy pixels blend into the background, making them difficult to find and collect. Of course their bullets are still very easy to see. Ninja mode is similar, but in reverse, your ship and bullets are difficult to see and locate, while enemy pixels are clear as day. Shirts colors all pixel types the same depending on if they are enemy or friend, making the player rely on the particle effects to tell which type of pixel they are collecting.
Main menu UI.
Upon selecting play, the player can use left and right arrows or joystick to change the difficulty mode. Pressing Y or X changes the game mode to CO-OP and/or Passive.
The options menu UI.
UI I designed to keep track of a player's high scores. A player can use left and right to change the difficulty displayed.
Because the Colosseum potentially records data for each boss you defeat, the high scores UI for this difficulty mode required a different layout. In this layout, left and right will still change the difficulty, but up and down will now also change the boss for which stats are displayed.
A leaderboard UI I designed.
The UI I designed for the in-game death screen when a player has reached a new high score.
The Pixel Galaxy logo that I designed.
A large promotional banner I created for Steam for Pixel Galaxy.
A small promotional banner I created for Steam for Pixel Galaxy.
All of the Steam achievements I created for Pixel Galaxy.
One of my main contributions to the game were several color schemes that were intended to add different layers of difficulty to the game. In-game, there are 37 unique color schemes.
