Phoenix Labs, feature design for Project Bismuth + Dauntless art support
During my time with Demiurge Studios I was one of two senior ux/ui artists embedded within a small team of 8 that was contracted to help Phoenix Labs in their push to release a cross-platform multiplayer dungeon crawler extraction game referred to at the time as Project Bismuth.
At the time I joined the project, a majority of the main game UI had already been established by Phoenix Labs’ in-house team. We were brought in to shore up outstanding features needed for release, and in my case this was the in-game Mailbox system used for sending messages and rewards to players from events, Phoenix Labs server-side, and eventually other players.
After digesting the design brief and dialoging with Phoenix Labs’ design lead I conducted competitive research and analysis and presented them with two options for layout and behavior of the feature.
Following selection I quickly mocked out some user flows using the project’s existing design pattern library. After a couple rounds of iterations and discussions on requirements and future product considerations we had the behavior and functionality we wanted.
Next on the docket was visual design and implementation in UMG. Because Project Bismuth was set in the same world as Phoenix Labs’ flagship MMORPG Dauntless, I was able to draw inspiration and reference from existing art and motifs from that world. Below is a decorative border element inspired from those resources that I created as a vector object and could start applying different treatments to.
From there, just a matter of implementation in UMG.
To round out the rest of the functionality of the feature, we needed to show states of messages (e.g. Viewing, Read, Unread), and have the ability to delete read messages:
The final piece of functionality required was the ability to collect rewards or items from the Mailbox. This came in the form of the Collection UI built in UMG using Named Slots to allow for flexibility in layout and usage.
Sadly, it was at this time we received word that Phoenix Labs was cancelling Project Bismuth and instead focusing on its existing live-ops title Dauntless. While this was extremely unfortunate news as the game seemed promising, Demiurge’s contract with Phoenix Labs was still in effect. Myself and the other ux artist were asked to completely shift gears from feature design and implementation to art support.
To wit, icon design. At the time of the assignment Dauntless already had a run time of five years and a world of content and lore to draw from which might explain the variety of items needing iconography.
Though the ill-fated shelving of Project Bismuth was an unfortunate end note for one project, I did ultimately receive a nice Figma comment from Dave, the stakeholder of the icon assignment, for a particular weapon talent that results in the player receiving healing when jumping through a portal:
I’ll take that all day.