A multiplayer first-person shooter practice project. I focused on improving my rigging/modeling and doing some game UI work. We sat down, went over the design, and I got to work.

How can I design a UI that fits a cowboy theme but is simple enough to be understood at a glance? How can I go about creating and modeling a bird character as a player?

The end result for my UI is below. While it could use further UX testing it worked well enough for a starting screen.

To get started the first thing I did was work with the programmer to find a font we agreed on. We looked at many free fonts on Google Fonts and settled on Rye and later Smokum. The programmer then set up some placeholder stuff for now.

3D model and rig

From here I started to work out some basic models that could be used for characters. I created a very simple bird in Blender.

I would go back and update it further and you can see a video below of me trying out a later version.

With a working model, I handed that off for my programmer to use as I got back to the art assets for the menu.

Spritesheet

And yeah, went through a variety of versions until I settled on a style I liked.

I made a lot of this in Affinity Design and Photoshop and was still figuring out the best way to display things

Originally I quickly painted some wood but it didn’t have the effect I wanted… So I just made a simpler version.

I would work on various art elements.

Not all my ideas were that great but I thought the different hats could be used for teams or player identifers…

I thought about different ways to display the score…And yeah they were too complicated but it was fun to think about nonetheless.

I thought about other more complicated cases…

I don’t think we even ended up using a scoreboard in the end lol. It was still some decent practice on game UI and rigging and would later help me feel more comfortable setting up rigging for other more complicated models.