Get to Know… The Hutch User Interface Team
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For those new to the mobile gaming industry, it can be difficult to get your head around who does what and the differences between departments. And that can make things confusing if you're trying to get your foot on the first rung of your career ladder!
So when our latest work experience student, Malaika joined us for 2 weeks, we gave her free rein to interview a range of Hutchies across different departments and ask them whatever she wanted! In this blog post, Malaika gets to know the Hutch User Interface team.
Meet Malaika…
My name is Malaika and I’m an A-Level student currently studying English Literature, Graphic Design and Psychology. During my work experience at the Hutch London office, I had my eyes opened up to a diverse selection of career pathways within the games industry. I primarily shadowed and completed tasks from two departments that unexpectedly overlapped with my current studies: Creative Services and User Interface Art.
With this, I would like to share my understanding of the various job roles I was exposed to with other students – using responses from actual Hutch employees – in hopes that, like me, you will be able to recognise how you can use your discipline to approach a job in the gaming industry that you may not have otherwise considered.
The User Interface Team
During my work experience I shadowed the art team who look after the User Interface (UI) across Hutch’s game projects. Lead UI Designer, Mark took me through the ins and outs of his team and examples of the many approaches taken when creating work. I was amazed to hear about the importance of colour language and ensuring seamless flows between game screens, as it combined my interest in both Graphic Design and Psychology.
Mark then gave me a task to come up with a Miami-themed crate design for Hutch’s game F1® Clash. One thing that surprised me is how often the artists have to create new assets for offers and bundles in the game. It’s not something you really think about at first but when you notice that most games always release event packs for something even as common as celebrations, you gain appreciation towards the people behind the scenes that have to maintain these changes.
Before I even started on the crate design, research had to take place in the format of a mood board consisting of all the elements that make Miami… well, Miami! Then, I had to implement those ideas into the three sides of the crate that get shown on screen. It sounded easy at first, however, considering that the crate will look much smaller when displayed in the game, the design had to be strategic in terms of how it would be distinguishable amongst the other existing crate designs in the game. It not only had to be a simplistic enough design that players can instantly tell it is Miami, but it also had to fit within the strict branding guidelines as to be consistent with F1® Clash’s style.
When speaking to various employees at the office, I became aware of the fact that so much of the design process relies upon approval from people outside of the company. For example, for F1® Clash, every single design created – including all of the versions that contain only slight differences – has to get a ‘thumbs up’ from the people at Formula One before commercial use. This is to ensure that Hutch is using their brand image the way they want it to be presented.
This is similar to their other games such as Top Drives which features many car manufacturers and models, as every new car has to be fully approved and licence granted in order to use them anywhere in the game; this also affects UI if you want to use their name, brand colours and logos across screens in the game. The licence approval process and time frames must be considered when planning new releases in case certain things get rejected and need amending (which then need to be submitted again for review until the final state is approved).
The Interview
(with Daniel, UI Artist)
When there is a new event in the game, how quickly do you need to create a design for features?
This all depends on the scope of the feature, something relatively small such as a news popup screen may take a couple of weeks, and others such as user-generated content can be months or years in the making. There can also be an aspect of urgency for some features to ensure they are still relevant by the time they are implemented into a game. When a new feature is introduced, time is designated to plan them in advance and a rough estimate is generated for how much time each discipline will need to create it.
What software and/or materials does your team use to effectively carry out tasks?
On a daily basis, we use Photoshop, Illustrator and Unity. Photoshop is used for creating screen mock-ups and exporting UI assets ready to go into the game. Everything that is created here is optimised and broken down into smaller pieces to save as much memory as possible, ready to be rebuilt in Unity. Illustrator is used mainly for iconography and anything that needs to be vectorised (creating vectors allows us to resize assets without causing pixelation which is important, especially with marketing materials).
Usually, everything created in Illustrator also needs to be processed through Photoshop before being implemented into Unity. Unity is then the central place for creating the game, this is where everyone's work comes together to create the foundations for the project. The UI assets are pieced together in objects called Prefabs ready to be hooked up, animated and overlaid on the correct scene in the game. I spend a lot of time working with coders to help get these up and running. Communication is the strongest skill you can have at this stage to make sure the coders have a good understanding of what they need to make the UI interactive.
We also occasionally use Figma, After Effects and Blender depending on what we are trying to achieve. Figma is a great way to quickly create functioning mock-ups of screens, button states and interactivity. It helps showcase initial concepts, tests ideas and visualises ideas from a very early stage in the process. It can also be used to help engineers understand exactly how the user interface and user experience should function when being implemented in Unity.
After Effects is mainly used to visualise and create unique animations, some of which can be passed over to technical artists to be turned into shaders within the game. Lastly, Blender is used to render out 3D objects that need to be exported with our designs on them, a good example of this would be the crates in F1® Clash, although we haven't created the 3D object itself, we still need to be able to apply different textures that we have created to the crates and get them ready to be imported into Unity.
How can someone get into UI design?
I think a passion for video games is where it all stems from for me and will probably be a key aspect for most people wanting to get into the industry. Other key characteristics from my experience would be communication, time management, patience, and attention to detail.
As for how I got into the industry, from a young age I learned Photoshop and After Effects to make gaming content for YouTube, I mainly focused on iconography, and I then attended University to study Graphic Design based on this. Whilst studying I taught myself Unity through YouTube channels and forums as I knew I wanted to gravitate more into the gaming industry and for my final year project, I created my own platform game. From this game, and my previous experience with Photoshop and Illustrator I was able to get my first position as a junior UI/UX artist.
As there aren't many University courses out there that go into detail on UI/UX within the games industry, it’s important to jump in and learn the basics of it and the key programs yourself. Keep in mind Unity is a behemoth though; I am still learning new things to this day so don’t give up!
Do you ever incorporate your own artistic ‘flair’ into the designs, or is there a set template / strict guideline you have to follow?
This one depends on the stage and brief, some allow us to go wild and get creative, which is often the case at the beginning of a project where you have more freedom to explore styles and brainstorm. However, there are some projects which are focused on creating designs within pre-set guidelines, for example, when working with external IP's who have been around for decades and already have a distinct style that needs to be adhered to (to ensure brand consistency) which obviously leaves little room for personal art styles. Although I would say I prefer the more creative option, to excel as a UI artist you need to have the ability to do both and know when it’s appropriate to add your own flair.
Do you have to always consider copywriting laws before you create something?
Copyright is a tricky one these days, especially with the integration of AI-generated designs. If there is anything we think could be problematic we usually run it by licensing for approval. Everything from code, designs, ideas, names etc. can be potentially problematic, so it is something that is always on the back of my mind when creating new things. If you're lucky you will just be asked to remove copyrighted material from the game, however, the worst-case scenario would be a lawsuit and no company wants to have to go through this.
Font licences can be particularly tricky in some cases, if the player base exceeds a certain number (that's usually in the small print) this can cost a lot of money to rectify. If you're creating a game yourself, I would recommend sticking to a Google font, they are free to use commercially and there won’t be any surprises further down the line.
Read Malaika's blog post about Creative Services here.
Like the sound of working at Hutch? Check our our latest vacancies here: https://www.hutch.io/careers/.
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