Star Wars: Hunters is a third person arena shooter for mobile and Nintendo Switch
On Star Wars: Hunters I served for two years as a Principle Artist before moving to be the UI Art Lead as our team has continued to grow. Coming onto the team directly after the prototyping phase, I worked alongside the Studio Art Director and Creative Director, as well as our partners at Lucasfilm to help define the look and feel of Hunters from the ground up. We went through months of style exploration looking to find that sweet spot that felt like Star Wars to any fan of the series, but also uniquely Hunters. We wanted to stay true to the brand, but our own unique identity. This was true for both the in-world visuals as well as the presentation of the UI.
User Interface
For the look of the UI, we took some of the traditional Star Wars shape language and pulled in reference from lots of entertainment and sports broadcasting. Everything from WWE and football matches, and even monster truck rallies. The bigger and more bombastic, the better! We used a lot of angular shapes to help keep things feeling bold and never static, often having text and containers all angled forward to avoid feeling too static.
HUD Design
Lots of experimenting and rapid prototyping went into figuring out the right HUD for the battles as well as refining the style and animations across each of the various game modes
Icon Design
In addition to the Hunters, there were plenty of other icon assets that I designed, from currencies and collectibles in a rendered 3D style, to navigation and abilities in a flat graphic style.
For navigation and ability icons I developed a flat graphic style using only one or two colors in order to keep things easily readable no matter what size they were shown at or what was going on in the 3D world space behind them.
In-World Graphics
I also worked with the VFX Artists to produce a lot of the in-world displays that are scattered throughout the battle arenas as well as the various scenes seen throughout the main menu.
Key Art
While my main focus was serving as the UI Art Lead, I tended to work on a bit of everything in between designing major features, from character and skin concepts, to camera placement, and marketing images.
I set the style for the in-game key art for things like our events, challenges, shop bundles, and message of the day. The artwork tended to be a mixture of a 3D scene where I’d set up the character and pose, adjust the lighting and camera, and then bring that shot into photoshop for lots of additional illustration, adjustments, and added FX.
The Hunter logos are all designed to evoke the feeling of team logos that you’d traditionally see in major league sports, the idea is that these help to establish a personal brand for each Hunter that we can use in the UI, but also as part of their in-world lore. Though the style for each logo could vary a bit from one Hunter to another, the idea was always to pull in materials or colors from the Hunters themselves, and create logos that would match their personality in the Arena.
