DRACOMATON

Finalist in GWB Game Awards 2023

Role: UI Artist, UI/UX Designer, Producer

Tools: Figma, Krita, Unity, Github

Overview

DRACOMATON is a top-down rogue-like 2D bullet hell shooter. Its mechanics involve allowing the player to mod weapons with other weapons to build up passive effects, as well as items that also increase player power.

Goals

From the beginning, our goal as designers was to make the game understandable and approachable, while balancing keeping systems complex enough to be interesting. Our goal as visual artists was to keep the style and visual language consistent and readable.

Key Features

Icons (Forms)

Items in DRACOMATON work the way they do in most other games; passive effects that enhance player power in some way. In the case of Chaos Items, there are sometimes severe drawbacks

For Form icons, it was important to make sure each form and its subsequent abilities and mods were consistent with each other
- Mod Evolutions in particular needed iterations to make sure they functioned to convey a form, as an evolved mod replaces the form icon in the Mod Menu.
For items, because there was multiple people working on various items, it was trickier to maintain visual language consistency, but in some cases it was good to stray away from it to preserve readability

Mod Menu (Process)

Weapons in DRACOMATON are called Forms. Each Form has a Primary (usually a variation on a bullet) and Secondary attack (something more impactful, but requires longer cooldown). Three Forms can be equipped at once to switch between in-combat, but other Forms can be used to Mod them, or give them passive abilities. The more an equipped Form is used, the more experience it will gain, and it will have a strengthened Mod effect once the experience reaches its cap.

The Mod Menu design stayed essentially the same from wireframe to final, though I added additional visual language of giving the Form slots a gear shape, and Mod slots a hexagon bolt shape.
For first-time user experience, descriptions of Forms and abilities were moved from empty space on the screen and onto a pop-up that only appears when hovering on certain icons.

Mod Menu (Final)

Forms HUD (Process)

The main goal of the Forms HUD was to show:
- Ability Cooldowns: Largely unchanged, it consists of two boxes next to each other that show the cooldowns for the right click and left click abilities.
- Battery Meters: This changed over the design process, but in the current version it is now a focal point at the top of the element, and color greatly helps distinguish forms at a glance when switching between them.
- Form EXP: A ring around the form icon attached to each Battery Meter shows how much experience a player had gathered for an equipped form.
USB vs. Battery Tubes
- USB: Initially, the HUD had a visual indicator for the Mods under each equipped Form, as well as their respective experience bars. In the final level up system, there are only two level states for a Mod, meaning the level number wasn't necessary. Additionally, the mods of an equipped form isn't thought about much during combat, so they could be removed too.
- Battery Tubes: The function of the battery also became more important in the final design of the battery system, meaning I made that the main focus of the HUD. Additionally, instead of having three different displays of the primary and secondary abilities, having the same display just swap through them saves a lot of space