Home // Other Skills // Motion Tests
Sometimes you just have to see something in motion to know if it is going to work the way you expect it to. Following are a few studies I did to flesh out a design concept. Some Ideas here ended up in one for or another into a shipping game. Others were more of a cost-effective way of knowing which roads to not go down.
Procedurally generated map concept
This example is a mockup of how the Destiny 2 map could have looked. I tried an idea out that used a procedurally generated map, as opposed to one created and maintained by an artist. While this would have given players excellent fidelity, the limitations of our engine would not allow us to display any bubble of the destination except the one your character was currently in. This defeated several of the maps main purposes - to travel to various locations and see all the activities on a given destination.
Post-Game Carnage Report concept
In our early cursor explorations, I wanted to see how far we could push the counterscrolling. How much content could we keep offscreen? In this exploration, the player could see several pages worth of stats without ever leaving the page. While this worked great for exploration and discovery, it was not well suited for quickly finding and getting the data the player may want to see.
Halo Map Test
This is an old mockup I did (circa 2005) of an in-world map for Halo 3. We actually got it functioning in-engine and was able to try it out in playtests. After a short evaluation we decided not to move forward with the feature. While it worked really well in sectioned, tiered maps like Lockout or Ascension, the tech didn't fare so well on large flat open areas like Valhalla. Apart from technical concerns, players were spending too much time looking at the map instead of fighting, so we didn't move forward with the feature.
Halo Reach Mood Test
This is a short video loop that I created as I was exploring what kind of stylistic approach to take for the environment of the Halo Reach main menu. The Characters of the game hadn't been modeled yet, so I used Halo 3 player models as placeholders.
In-Game Grimoire
This was a very early test for a feature for Destiny we called the Grimoire. As the player unlocked and leveled up characters or items in the game, they could come here and get more info or receive rewards. In this example, I wanted to see how we could indicate newness for items that needed the player's attention, but do so in a way that didn't flash in disparate, gaudy ways.
Destiny 2 PC mouse Behavior Tests
The Destiny UI was created with a free cursor for many reasons, one of which would be our ability to port the game to the PC and control it with a mouse. Once we had the mouse working as an input device, however, it became clear that there was just way too much movement on the screen with the velocities we were seeing. These are some tests I did to see if there was a way to capture the same feel and flavor of the console version, while keeping the parallax movement from overpowering the screen.