Moonfallen is Chaotic Games' debut title that showcases the power of the Chaotic Engine. I led level, HUD and UI design for the game, as well as collaborated with art and engineering to concept and test multiple game mechanics in engine. I regularly was balancing whiteboxing play areas, testing nav meshes and enemy engagement paths, and testing and refining static and dynamic player UI.
The game lives in the browser, so many of my initial priorities consisted of ensuring we were delivering a seamless web experience that maintained key user touchpoints without sacrificing the impression of a console-quality gameplay experience. Some considerations included:
I leveraged AI to generate ideas for the game's tone, mood and gameplay environments, and combined these outputs with traditional design thinking exercises to yield testable level designs in the form of whiteboxing. I focused especially on balancing tension and relief. For the HUD and UI design I specifically analyzed top performing shooters' UI libraries and sought out patterns to employ and test. Every series of design decisions made would be implemented and then internally tested before being distributed to a curated pool of gameplay testers.
To marry the website with the game experience I worked to understand user journeys, starting from the many ingress points (URL link, CTA on the game site, link from Chaotic's portfolio, blast from a streamer to their audience, etc.) through to the primary end goals –playing the game and sharing the URL. I split the body of work into "out of play" (before actually playing) and "in play" (while playing) compositions and elements. I developed and designed a consolidated set of user flows that all shared the primary goal of moving the player forward to gameplay. Every decision, from shared link messaging to what color the play button is on the title page, was informed by this project value.
Out of game (primarily before the game play started), color was sparingly used. A golden hue, found in the story lore and level design, was leveraged as the driver of the palette throughout. It expressly indicated importance and interactivity. The Iceland and Exo typefaces were used to marry the futuristic themes with readability and volume of characters often needed in small spaces, respectively. Imagery was limited to glimpses of environment or character, extending the intrigue of the world you'd play within. All the tables, list items, buttons and cards were all concocted in a systematic way as to enable fast iteration on modules used on the pages. This was necessary as to not have to 'redo' work as paths to engagement and content being delivered was often shifting.
In game elements carried over the character and values of the pages that preceded them in the user flows out of game. Everything including alerts, tutorial prompts, gun modes and ammo count, health and vitality systems, and more were all derived with simple to create and implement elements such as percent opacity geometric shapes, corner notches, thin line weights and flat iconography.
This was a unique opportunity to explore the world of game UI, HUD and level design within the bounds of a familiar context (web). I set out to achieve a look and feel that didn't get in the way of users getting to the game. When in the game, I didn't want the UI getting in the way of playing and seeing the world around them. The primary fruit of this game was its showcasing of high fidelity models, textures and a full terrain system that delivers worlds and characters never before seen at this level in a browser. The UI is there to support this visual and sensory experience, and do so with a concise and efficient set of design patterns. Perhaps the most important achievement, however, is the ability for players to share the game with others to instantly play by way of multiple share links out of game and share links built into gameplay interactions. Moonfallen has been key in promoting Chaotic Engine, so much so that it helped land Chaotic's first studio partnership.
More details about this project are available on request.
