Spring Submission - Concepts and Idea's

So carrying on from my initial moodboarding and thoughts I decided to create a few designs to test the direction of my designs, I could show the sketches to my group and focus my designs around what they liked.

To start off i wanted a little visualisation of what the screen might look like, in order to better come up with some designs that would fit appropriately onto the screen. So since our group opted (at my nudging) to do a one hit kill but no lives system the top left corner of the screen would now become a good place for a score bar (since it's usually a primary focus so things like HP and Mana bars usually get allocated here.

The top right could be used for a high score bar, which would be nice if it could track the users highest score for them to compete against. It's also out of the way enough that you can look at it, but it will not be distracting to the user.

and the bottom i though could maybe have a boss health bar, since we want to have boss battles in the game. I like the UI location for Transistor as having it centered at the bottom was appealing to look at, i also thought it's placement would be good to keep the player aware of the boss fight since it would be so important that it gets such an important place on screen.

The designs themselves were all centered around various themes, i had themes like; gears, scouters, industrial, clamps, space/galaxy, VR displays and so forth. Though i would say they were generally focused around the ideas of a space shooter.

Getting feedback upon this we opted to go for the theme of gears, with a little bit of the industrial thrown in there to add to the whole "spaceship" aspect of the game.

So as to build up a few more idea's before refining them and doing the UI in Photoshop i decided to create a few alternate versions on the gear theme, using shapes that would act as a sort of virtual display, with some slight transparency so that the gears in the background would be visible.

To help i also expanded on how the gears themselves would look since they would be the prominant part in the UI, its also around this time that we decided to call the name "Crusader" so i wanted to incorporate that a little into the design, so some of the gears had a cross like plateface , or slightly angular gear cogs to resemble a cross shape to help convey this.

The Next step will be to take this through in Photoshop and refine this to be something usable in the game.

Bonus; Also some of these sketches cover the ideas i had for the menu system for the game, since its very mechanical based i tried mashing that up with some retro styled screens (left image) to have a border of gears and plates, with a simple image of the ship and menu options based on retro games like Megaman. 

After feedback the suggestion was more that the menu would look better to look like the interior of the ship, so as if the player was selecting their course of action before starting the game from inside the ship. So i have a small example of what that might look like, with the menu's being a hologram display.