Rome wasn't built in a day...
Total War Rome Remastered was my first Design project at Feral Interactive. It provided a key opportunity to learn more about design from those with more experience. Initially I was tasked with updating the tooltip design – a key UI element in any Total War game. The rest of the project saw me assist the Lead Designer with various gameplay and UI tasks. Notable tasks included reorganising the game's settings and redesigning the Minimap/Battle Speed controls of the HUD. This was achieved while keeping to the design brief setup by the Lead Designer.
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During the project, I learned importance of working closely with the Leader Designers, UI & Gameplay Developers, UI Artists and Quality Assurance to create a cohesive game.
The Final Product
Information-Rich Tooltips
My aims for Tooltips were to make them familiar to more modern Total War players as well as providing concise and information rich experience. This was achieved by replacing the text-only tooltips seen in the original with a ‘multi-media’ design. These new tooltips would use icons/imagery to convey important information and would be used to expose parts of the game which we previously obscured such as building upgrades. To keep the tooltips from becoming too large, they would have an expanded state which would be manually triggered by the player which on button press, would display more information. Benefits of this design is that the content would not shift unexpectedly; making content easier to read, and that I could tie this to an easy-access hotkey to the manual which would open context aware content.
Minimap & Speed Controls
While reviewing the Campaign and Battle HUD, I had noticed that the Minimap and Speed Control cluster were using lots of padding, resulting in an inefficient use of screen-space. I therefore lead the effort to re-engineer this area of the UI. The result was that the Minimap cluster obscured considerably less of the 3D world behind, while the buttons for speed controls were in an easier to reach position for use with a Mouse and Keyboard (following Fitts’ Law) in the top-right corner of the screen.
Enhanced Camera & Tactical View
Updating the Camera behaviour/controls was another area of focus for me. Like the rest of the game, the camera for both Campaign and Battle needed to feel seamless to new player of Rome Remastered while keeping the camera familiar to original players. I designed two camera systems for the game; Remastered & Classic. The Remastered camera was based on the latest Total War games and required delicate tuning to get right – especially with regards to height adjustment. The Classic Camera was meant to be as similar to the Original Rome Total War camera as possible. To polish the new cameras, I designed the animation transition that would take the player between the normal camera view and the tactical layer in both Campaign and Battle modes.