"What's The Rush?" was the first ever project I worked on with Joey. He was looking for an artist would could understand who he was and his poetry, and turn that into art that his readers could relate to. I was up for the challenge!
I sent him initial sketches of my ideas to make sure I was the right one for the job and once those were approved I was given the creative freedom to illustrate whatever I thought would represent his poems.
We ended up using 40+ of my gestural illustrations in the book, and I was also asked to create the cover. I brought Joey's idea to life and helped him format the cover for printing. Many other projects came after the books release such as an audio book cover and a lyric video for a song based on the book.
"WHAT'S THE RUSH?"
TOOLS:
CLIENT: JOEY KIDNEY
DATE: OCT 2018 - OCY 2019
DESCRIPTION
OVERVIEW
ROLE
In this project, myself and collaborator Farhad Omarzad tried to design a solution to one of the biggest UX gripes we have with Elden Ring. In a game with grueling and intense combat, it makes it even more stressful for the user when they have to individually scroll through a list every time they want to use a spell. In our own personal experience with the game, this discouraged us from using a diverse amount of spells during combat. Even if we had nine spell slots, we usually only utilized four, since it was tedious to scroll through any more than that while in combat.
I collaborated on designing the weapon wheel in Photoshop and was responsible for animating and overlaying the weapon wheel over gameplay footage in After Effects.
PROBLEM
As shown in this video, it is difficult for magic users to manually flip through the spells list one by one, in order to get to their desired spell. This is especially the case while in intense combat where one second of hesitation can result in player death.
SOLUTION
We designed a weapon wheel system in which a player can quickly and efficiently select their desired spell, even while in combat. It is much more effective for players to be able to visually see all of their available spells rather than scrolling through a list that only displays one spell at a time. With this solution, players can simply open the weapon wheel system and choose their desired spell with one click.
PROTOTYPES
After creating the weapon wheel system in Photoshop, we brought it into After Effects to animate it. We recorded game footage to overlay the weapon wheel system onto of to fully demonstrate how this solution would be implemented into the game. We created two prototype versions; one in a less distracting scene of the game and one in a more intense combat situation.
