Last Broadcast

The theme and gameplay of the game surrounds the idea of playing music as a radio host. So I created these two menus based on the record player in the room. When the players press escape, they see a short animation bringing in the pause menu, and when they want to select a different option, the disc rotates. 

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For the Settings menu, I picked gold as the accent color, the same color as the needle of the recorder. It helps harmonize the screen and still stands out from the background. While I wanted to add more buttons to this menu, we were limited by time and the capability of engineers.

The theme and aesthetic of Last Broadcast is quite similar to Firewatch(2016). So before we set up the environment, we used the screenshot of Firewatch to create UI mock ups. 

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Most of the game happens in dialogue, so a good UI for the dialogue system is very important. I took inspiration from games like Life is Strange, and wanted to place the ui in a physical space in the world. Unfortunately, the design of the gameplay requires player to move around while having the dialogue UI on screen. So we went with the second layout.

We collaborated with many music composers and artists and created albums in-game for players to choose from. Players will walk in front of the album rack, interact with it, and see this UI. 

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Most of the time, the player will pick one song out of two, so the mock-ups reflect that. I wanted to showcase both album cover art, so I created a split placement that looks like the player is holding one album in each hand. To avoid confusion, I dimmed the album that was not currently chosen and faced it away from the player.

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The director had mentioned that they would like to use sticky notes/ more stationery in the radio station, so we tried to incorporate that by putting the album name and artist name on a sticky note. 

Similar to the dialogue menu, I wanted the Interaction UI to be diegetic.

 

However, the visibility of this version of the mock-up is not quite clear from afar. Our engineers also brought up the issue of having to put many buttons all over the physical space, making bugs hard to track. So this mock-up was stashed away.