As part of a small team working on maintaining and improving this mobile MMORPG and was lucky enough to work with some really talented people. From updating tools, rewriting server code and adding all new features the job provided a wealth of experience. I enjoyed and became particularly adept in user interface design. The game was originally built in objective c and then ported to Unity. It meant the UI screens had diffcult layouts that had a number of hard coded positions. As time permitted I rewrote a number of the UI screens with an editor based artist friendly approach. Here a some notes accompanying the before and after screen shots.
The was a particularly difficult rework, not only was it a complicated page in itself it was also crucial for the players to work similarly to the old one so as not to be disorientating. The old page suffered from being sloooow with large inventories so that was the first thing I had to remedy. After figuring out how to increase the performance, which actually improved the page speed tenfold, the next thing was to rewrite the 3d view to be much larger. This viewport was done with an artist friendly approach and could be resized in the scene with ease. The old tabs at the top where replaced with a dropdown which was much more versatile and powerful.
The orignal stats screen was actually missing basic information when I first joined, no sigils counts where present. It was having to work out how to add to this screen that inspired me to rewrite them it was so painful. Kept the same left/right panels of information but dramatically improved the clarity of the layout and along with some great art assets the new pages looks awesome.
This page showed a number of the issues the old system had, from ugly stretched scrollbars to lots of spacing and size issues. The rework cleaned everything up and the also allowed the reuse of the reward system component written by a colleague for the conversation system. We tried to use this component based approach as much as possible when we made changes to the game
Along with the layout issues all the old pages had the social pages also had a number of edge case bugs that kepy cropping up. The network layer was untouched and this clean rework was ready to go in for the next release, had a number of nice details like the player class logo in the listing.
"Hail Hydra!"