This project was initiated in March of 2019 and completed the following April, as a part of Team Swirl. The sketches above is one half of study of Sonic game targeting reticles.
Though many games feature attacks where characters home in on enemies, the similarly fast Sonic the Hedgehog games tend to have very striking homing attack reticles. To solve the problem of getting players to pay attention to in-game targets without being distracting for an action-platformer game demo played at very high speeds, I drew sketches with arrows of depicting the animations of each homing attack reticle in the studies above.
Other games feature similar homing attacks, such as Airstep or Lockshot in the Kingdom Hearts franchise, warp-striking in Final Fantasy XV, or using the hookshot or boomerang items in certain games from the Legend of Zelda series. These games use reticles to identify what objects can and cannot be targeted, and have a beginning pre-target animation, middle mid-target/attack animation, and an ending post-target animation.
After multiple sketches and feedback with my fellow designers at Team Swirl like leads Infinite and Radiant, I settled on the design seen above—the blobs surround a target while the spiked circle marks it, identifying the target for the player. This homing attack reticle design was designed in Photoshop as a scalable vector path to make it usable at higher resolutions. Each layer was then animated in After Effects—at the time, a personal first.
This was the homing attack targeting reticle as implemented in the Unreal Engine 4 development environment by Radiant. Further adjustments to the animation were made in After Effects in response to feedback not only from Radiant and Infinite but other members of Team Swirl with regards to making sure each component moved at exactly the right time and to the right position relative to other components of the reticle.
