Transformers Age of Extinction was a classic run & gun 3D game. The game followed a strict release date ahead of the movie release. Transformers was the first game DeNA built with Unity, which means there were alot of technical issues the team never came across before. I was the UI Designer on the team and led efforts in developing the menu flow.
MENU FLOW
To gain an understanding of the holistic view of the game, I quickly made a flow chart of the entire game. The goal was to capture all the key screens and made sure we did not miss any important screens that was part of the core loop.
WIREFRAMES
My first real challenge was to quickly mock up the interaction flow between each screen. The schedule did not allow any planning work, wireframes must be created to inform how engineers architect the frontend. I used references from previous games and received guidance from the game designers in hashing out the details in each screen.
ICONOGRPAHY
Together with another UI Designer we came up with these icons to be implemented. Given the amount of references we had, we tried to stay true to the Transformers visual language. We had to act quick because of the deadline and we’re designing as the Engineers are implementing.
IMPLEMENTING NGUI
The deadline was closing in and the team had to move quickly. I jumped into Unity to help implement the UI with NGUI. From preparing the assets, making atlases, setting anchors for responsive screens to animating the UI, it was a fun experience to see your design comes alive.
LAUNCHING WORLD WIDE
This game had finally launched world-wide on June 19th, 2013 on iOS, Android and Amazon. The game was received well and it hit a record-breaking DAU’s (1.5 million) across ALL DeNA West Studio.
