This is a solo project I started in my Junior year of college.  My goal was to create a game by myself so I could better learn more aspects of the game creating process. Project Run has two main phases, being a matching phase and a survival phase where the Player's ability to play each phase will effect the next round.

My thought process going into Project Run for the UI was to have something clean and easy to understand.  The main menu was based on the idea of a lock rotating into place, and was one of my first trials of placing animation with my scene changes.  I wanted the main menu to give off a very passive and calm feeling, to ease the player into the first phase of the game.

While in game the player has various ways to interpret the information needed for the game itself.  The panel on the left side shows the Player their health and shield, as well as a graph of how much of each color they attained during the first phase.  The left panel holds a button to return to the menu, as well as a board of tips for that specific phase.  

At the moment I like the setup of the UI, in the future as I continue working on the game I will be reworking the Menu UI as a whole as well as the Tips portion of the UI.  I think the idea for the both of them were in the right place, but the execution of them could be so much better.

Other than the help I had from Lynda.com on the basics of the match portion of the game, all of the programming was done by myself.  This includes programming the UI, Menu Navigation, and all of Phase Two.

The UI is put together in a way that I enjoy, but could use help from more solidified art assets.  The most challenging part was the graph, which displays the amount of colors the Player matched in the first phase.  The UI layout will continue to have minor changes as the game progresses in development, but the layout will most likely stay close to the same.

Phase Two was where I spent most of my time programming.  The second phase is a 3x3 grid, where each piece of the grid can "open" to the Player if they match enough pieces in that portion of the grid in the first phase.  For this phase I needed to learn a lot about data management and efficiency in programming.  With the number of moving pieces that I had, it was very easy to write inefficient code which would end up lagging the scene.  Of this whole project, I ended up learning the most from this phase.

A good portion of my time on this project was spent on the overall design of each piece of the game.  This includes the level layout for each phase, the overall UI, and the physical assets for the whole game.

The level design was based on a 9x9 grid layout, allowing for a 3x3 grid to lay underneath the 9x9 grid.  The 9x9 grid would hold the match portion of the game, while the 3x3 grid would hold the survival portion of the game.  Since a majority of the game revolved around this grid, I wanted the rest of the game UI and Art to also have a crisp and clean feeling to it.

The physical assets were an interesting experience to make.  I do not have much experience creating assets for a game, and only have little experience with Adobe Illustrator.  While I did enjoy some of the pieces I made, others did not turn out as well.  What I noticed was that a lot of the assets were missing a complete feel to them.  They seemed disconnected from each other, which is a huge issue.  As I continue developing this game, art direction will be on the top of the list, for the UI especially.