Planet Crafter

Planet Crafter is a survival game aimed at terraforming a planet. 

It's core loop involves exploration, material-gathering and item-crafting.

It's a great game with a lot of depth and a very rewarding gameplay, but it definitely has room for UX improvements.

• UX

  • I wanted to make it easier and faster to navigate through the blueprints. Especially since this is a survival game where your vitals are constantly depleting even in menus. 

  • The blueprints are the highlight of this menu, yet they currently occupy only a small portion of the screen, and are surrounded by elements that draw attention away from them.

  • Also, item legibility is affected because of various factors: the translucency of the menu, the size of blueprint tiles, and the huge lock icons overlaying the locked items.

• UI

• I wanted to bring a futuristic sci-fi hologram feel to the UI art direction.

• The current UI does seem to have taken some inspiration from this style, but its relatively minimal and flat, which can be stylized further.

• The UI can also be polished further with better proportions, hierarchy, and alignment with various other visual design principles.