MODNATION RACERS
United Front Games
Sr UX/Systems Designer
2010
ModNation Racers was Sony's latest addition to the kart racing genre. Dubbed Mario Kart meets LittleBigPlanet the game had robust customization tools.
My duties included leading the UI art team, designing flows, wireframes, icon creation and UX interaction systems for Track Studio, Character Studio, and Kart Studio
PRIMARY NAV MENU
For the primary UI navigation we chose an icon driven circle menu in order to keep the menus easy to navigate and light on text while giving the whole UI an inviting, playful look and feel.
When the user drilled into a circle menu, the section selected would appear as the parent icon of the next menu and these stacked as breadcrumbs providing 'at-a-glance' understanding of how deep a user was from the root menu.
TRACK STUDIO
ModNation Racers had an extensive track creator called Track Studio. Designing the tool set and interface was one of my primary roles on the project.
Players had a significant degree of freedom when creating and styling their tracks. I designed both a basic and an advanced way to build tracks so that we could appeal to both the casual gamer as well as the power user.
TRACK STUDIO: PROPS
Players could choose from multiple prop themes that they could place in multiple ways including auto-populate, individual prop placement, or using sprays which could spray out multiple randomized props at once.
Players could, for example, spray out a forest of varied trees in a single stroke. With a single click they could then switch to individual prop select and edit each tree uniquely.
DESIGN DOCS: TRACK
I created all design documentation for Track Studio.
DESIGN DOCS: CHARACTERS
Special consideration was placed on how often a user needed to make a discreet action in their creation process: repetitive tasks, previewing, undo/redo, and switching quickly between action types needed to be intuitive and readily available.
Character and Kart creation allowed users to add up to 255 layers of decals onto their character as well allowing the placement and modification of 3D Props to change the profile of their characters.
SCREEN FLOWS
I created all screen flows and wireframes for the game. Designs included all of the social and online sharing aspects as well. All told there were about 150 unique screens.
UI ICONS
ModNation Racers had almost 200 unique icons. I was responsible for roughly half of them.
We designed them to be bold, simple, and playful. We wanted the interface to be light on text so the icons had to be quite descriptive.
REVIEWS
Overall, the game was very well received both critically and by the users. I was very proud to work with such a talented team.