Allan, please add details...
After the release of Alien Isolation on mobile, Hitman Blood Money Mobile (iOS & Android) and Nintendo Switch port would be my second assignment as a Lead Designer on a project.
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My overall goal for the project was to make Blood Money accessible to a new audience. This meant reworking the controls to work equally well on gamepad and on touch and updating the menu structure to better suit touch while retaining good gamepad/mouse and keyboard support.
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My main responsibilities on the project were the redesign of the Menu and HUD UI, developing the updated interaction system, designing the updated touch controls including the new Auto-Aim system and initial write up of the entire GDD.
The Final Product
A Universal UI
Going into the project, I knew the game would need to work well with both touch and gamepads (with a sprinkling of mouse and keyboard). I therefore took a lot of inspiration by the goals of Microsoft's UWP concept; where an apps UI could scale and adapt to differing planforms. While the UI could never be truly dynamic in Blood Money, I wanted to design a UI that would scale from a small phone screen to a TV and that would work perfectly on the three supported input modalities (Touch, Gamepad & Mouse & Keyboard) with as little changes as possible.
Reengineered Interactions
One of the biggest design dilemmas I encounter during the Blood Money port was on how to deal with the games various interactions. The original Blood Money relied on drop down menus to find out how the player wanted to interact with an object in the game world. A key decision I made early on is that the player should not be interrupted in moment-to-moment gameplay with drop down menus where possible. To solve this, I designed a gaze-based interaction system for the game which would require the player to look towards an object in order to interact with it. Buttons would then be assigned to various actions that could be performed to the object in question. As a result, changes to the interactions system would have significant knock-on effects to the controls.
Seamless Combat
A core concept of Hitman Blood Money was the ability to complete missions in a variety of ways. This means that a combat focused approach must be as suitable as one favouring stealth. This meant much like Alien Isolation mobile, the controls could not be seen as the reason why somebody failed a mission or resulted in a death. To improve the combat viability, I designed an auto-aim system similar to that I had designed for Alien Isolation. A crucial difference between the combat in both games is the number of targets a player is likely to encounter at once. In Alien this is up to 3 – whereby Hitman could be measured in the dozens. I therefore designed a way for players to be able to quickly switch between enemies and made subtle difference between the way this system handled on touch vs gamepad to provide an optimal experience for both.
Virtual Control Pad Mk.II
The second iteration of the Virtual Control Pad (VCP) built upon the work stated in its first revision for Alien Isolation. A focus of the VCP improvements for Hitman was to reduce its ‘intrusion’ onto the game space. This meant making sure button didn't feel like they impeded the player at any point. We introduced the ability to start a camera can gesture on all buttons that didn't require a ‘press and hold’ gesture. This reduced the number of times players may accidentally press a button when they intended to pan the camera. We also introduced a button fade out which would reduce the opacity of inactive buttons. Much like Alien Isolation, the VCP would be context-sensitive, only showing buttons on-screen which could be used in that moment.
Virtual Control Pad Editor Mk.II
Much like the Virtual Control Pad (VCP), the editor looked to build upon the work undertaken in the Alien Isolation mobile port. The largest change was the introduction of ‘Scenes’; a system where the user could edit the VCP layout for different parts of game. For Hitman Blood Money, this meant being able to additionally change the button layouts for using Scopes and Binoculars where the user would see unique button layouts.