Original Concepts
Southern, but Love is a 2D infinite runner developed in C# Unity 2D. I took on the role of the UI designer and developer. I handled the asset creation of a majority of UI elements and the management of those assets in game. Trick and Treat was the first GUI I worked on, and it wasn't until after did we realize the game was not resolution independent. With such a wide range of devices with different screen sizes, a game with a resolution independent GUI is necessary.
Our biggest issue was Unity's GUI system. For Trick and Treat we used the GUI system to display objects to the screen space. That worked until we tried other resolutions and found that they move all over the place. So this time around I decided to have all the GUI elements be game objects in the world space. This allowed for the use of certain functions such as OnMouseOver() or OnMouseDown() to control which sprite to change to and what event to fire off to the GUI Manager.
The original idea around the main menu was to have a bayou scene where when you select a button, the camera would pan across to the next menu. Due to scope issues within the environment art we were forced to in the end to have the foreground elements pan to the next menu. So when the main menu first loads up, it places everything according to the screen resolution. The other menus are placed just off screen. When you select it's respective button it is parented to the main menu. The main menu then swipes off to the right, pulling the new menu with it. That new menu is now at the camera center, and will remain there until one of the back buttons is pressed. Which at that point the main menu swipes back in and then makes all child game objects null. Play the game below to see the menu movements.
All assets were created using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. We wanted to give off a natural feeling, so I made the buttons with a theme of nature around them. For the added twist of the Love, we used a font called elmers sketch font. This was used to give the user the idea that someone took a knife and carved these words all in. Each button had their own scripts that when pressed would pass a reference to the UI manager where from there the manager would decide what would be done.
Below are snapshots of all UI elements designed by me
Unity Web Player | Southern, but Love