UI Design & Art

Development Time : 3 months

My Role : UI Designer & Artist

Game Engine : Unity

Platforms : Android

Game Description

Beyond the Cave is a mobile game where you manage a tribe of early humans, send them off to hunt or gather, and be faced with events that may be positive or negative depending on the season and region. It is a casual single-player game with a simple concept of keeping your tribesmen happy and healthy while either traveling across lands or settling in one place. The goal is to simply see how long you can survive as there is no true ending to the game.

My Work

With a team of three, I wore multiple hats of UI Designer, UI Artist, and did an overhaul on the game design of the game. I was tasked with designing the menu and many sub-menus that the player must navigate in order to manage their tribe, travel to a new region, check your calendar, and begin the next event.

I had written all the events that can be encountered. Starting an event moves the game forward, offering rewards if successful and hinder the tribe if failed. Some offer a choice that takes into account your tribe's stats, some are simply punishing, and if you're lucky others have no negative effects whatsoever. You can lose members if they die from certain events, or even if they grow unhappy and leave the tribe.

The character icons, various buttons, title screen, and other UI elements were digitally drawn by me in Photoshop. I took a hand-drawn stylized approach as I thought it better fit the themes.

Postmortem

Unfortunately, many of the design choices we made did not come about in an impactful way. We did implement stats for the individual members, and there were resources like food and happiness in the game, but none of these influenced much in the way we had hoped. A tribe member being unhappy did not increase the likelihood they would leave, nor did food really matter at all. We put a lot on our plate and were overly ambitious given the short development time available.

Some positives being this was my first experience working on a mobile game, learning the unique problems such as limited byte usage, screen size, and touch screen functionality. I certainly had a lot of fun deciding the art style and drawing out the various icons to represent certain events: seasons, companionship, terrain, spiritual, etc.