Scavengers
Scavengers was a free-to-play action shooter. Squads of three compete to survive and dominate in a hybrid of sandbox-style PVE and class-based PVP. A roster of adaptive Explorers armed with a combination of unique abilities and weapons conquer the challenges of a hostile wasteland.
Developer: Midwinter Entertainment
Released: July 13, 2020
My Role: UI & Game Designer
Responsibilities
• Designed and implemented user interface widgets to display in-game HUD information including reload indicators, an XP feed, mission notifications, and a quest log
• Developed game mode and mission content for an open world dynamic quest system using Blueprint and EQS
• Fixed a range of gameplay, UI, and localization bugs for live service updates
• Solved technical UI design challenges with gameplay engineers, identified script to nativize in C++
• Assessed stability of new interface elements by running console performance captures
• Developed game mode and mission content for an open world dynamic quest system using Blueprint and EQS
• Fixed a range of gameplay, UI, and localization bugs for live service updates
• Solved technical UI design challenges with gameplay engineers, identified script to nativize in C++
• Assessed stability of new interface elements by running console performance captures
Technical UI Design Example: Reload Indicator Widget
A reload indicator bar below the player's reticle shows the amount of ammo remaining in their current weapon's magazine.
Text below the ammo bar reminds players to reload when the magazine is at a designer specified low ammo threshold, ~25% capacity.
The reload bar background fill color turns red and flashes when reserve backpack ammo is critically low. Finally, a NO AMMO text element is displayed when no ammo remains to reload current weapon.
Most of the widget logic is handled in blueprint script but with time almost all BP nodes could be moved to material parameters.
Text below the ammo bar reminds players to reload when the magazine is at a designer specified low ammo threshold, ~25% capacity.
The reload bar background fill color turns red and flashes when reserve backpack ammo is critically low. Finally, a NO AMMO text element is displayed when no ammo remains to reload current weapon.
Most of the widget logic is handled in blueprint script but with time almost all BP nodes could be moved to material parameters.
Widget material logic I added allows UI designers to control color and rate of low ammo flashing widget
Technical UI Design Example: XP Feed
XP / "kill feed" HUD element I designed and implemented to show additional information to players after they earned experience points from kills or quest rewards.
New XP events are handled in widget blueprint running minimal script logic to parse data from the XP earning event into a human-readable string to display on the HUD feed. New text is added to a single text box and lines are removed after a set timer.
Technical UI Design Example: Mission System
I worked on the design and implementation of a mission system to show information about dynamic open world quests assigned to teams of players during Scavengers matches (a battle royale game mode).
Missions could have varying numbers of secondary objectives. Missions and objectives could have time limits, collection criteria, location requirements, and other scripted logic.
Some missions required players to simply clear a hostile enemy POI, other missions might require players to find and disable batteries powering a shield generator containing a mini-boss. Another mission might dynamically be generated for all players in the session if one scored a particularly high number of eliminations.
Community Gameplay Examples
