THINKING ABOUT INVENTORY

Hades II had the unique privilege of being Supergiant's first game with a proper inventory system. As a result, Inventory and other related screens came with unique challenges, such as how this view should present itself to the player while they managed hundreds of items.

I was brought on when the game was functional but at a fairly early stage in terms of visuals and menus. The art direction had been defined, but was still heavily in flux. Inventory was first presented to me as a crude greybox that loosely outlined potential item categories, a moon phase indicator (gameplay mechanic that influenced the nature of a run), a space for item descriptions, and tons of placeholders.

DESIGNING THE MARKET

The final illustration and accompanying assets were fleshed out from the layout that game designers and the art director best thought balanced gameplay and world building. With the Broker watching his wares on the right, the Market’s color scheme and relevant elements change to reflect if the player was in a buying (green) or selling (purple) state. Players are able to track items they needed, see how much existing inventory they have for a specific item, and get a small indicator if an item was no longer quest-relevant and safe to sell.

All visuals featured here were created and implemented by me using Photoshop and Supergiant’s own engine (C++), which we source controlled with Perforce. The layered visuals were then animated by our team’s motion designer, giving the screen its final touches.

SELECT SCREENS

Player inventory was just the start. Hades II has a vast variety of menus that needed to be pushed to a higher fidelity, all with their own specific lists of different properties and asks. Like Inventory, the following screens sere some of the many views I helped give identity to, from early drafts based on user experience explorations and product expectations all the way to player-facing full illustrations. With feedback from my art director, I owned creation, export, and implementation of the many moving parts that make up each screen. Several of these views were also adjusted multiple times over the course of Early Access in responsive to weekly player feedback, which I also helped handle.

The creation of all these screens were a massive team effort - in addition to Jen and Gavin, I worked alongside other members of the team like Caleb Cornett (Gameplay Engineer), Greg Kasavin (Creative Director, Writer), Dexter Friedman (Platforms Engineer), and Elle Hanson (UI Animator). Together, we squashed bugs, checked lore implications, fine-tuned designs, and determined how these screens would eventually move and become an immersive part of the greater game.

With this game being double the size of the original Hades with significantly more to do, there were massive icon asks that accompanied each new view and feature that I made it my main goal to tackle. This involved creating new icon sets consisting of hundreds of new, bespoke assets, in addition to revisiting old icons that needed a fresh coat of paint for this improved version of the game.

As the game was in Early Access for two years before its official release, many icons made their debut and were adjusted over the course of this time. Icons would often shift in identity or require an asset before it had one, so creating "usable placeholders" was necessary in addition to shippable work. I would perform regular icon audits weekly for sets such as ability icons to make sure they were consistent with game design changes, in addition to regular combing and replacing placeholders in the code. By the end of this contract, I was deeply familiar with the game's many folders and code calls for icons, big and small.