Face Your Inner Self

“threshold”

uX/UI game menu design

Role: UX/UI Design and Research, Programming

Client: Self

Duration: November 2024-Present

Team Size: 1

Tools: UX/UI Design, Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Unreal Engine 5, https://www.gameuidatabase.com/

What is this?

It is a first-person horror gaming experience that explores different mental health issues and how the character, Cassie, overcomes them. The player navigates levels representing the most common and chronic issues, including anxiety disorders, depression, and phobias. It is meant to be both a thrilling and a healing game, with the player being guided and challenged after they cross every threshold.

This ongoing, constantly developing project will continue to grow and be added until it is completed. Stay tuned!

Summary

The player is the protagonist, Cassie, having just come home from an intense therapy session that forced her to think about her mental health issues that she would prefer to keep buried. So much at once causes Cassie to disassociate, which is where the player takes over. The play needs to navigate the world of her mind through various levels, located in different rooms in her apartment, thus crossing the “Threshold” to meet the challenges head-on. It will take all her wit and bravery to confront her deepest fears, as the further she goes, the more terrifying it becomes.
Create a single-player, first player game exploring seven different mental illnesses (anxiety, mood disorders, psychotic disorders, addiction, personality disorders and PTSD) to get to the root cause of the issues and face it head on, defeating the game.

Inspiration for the Menu designs

The primary menus I wanted to focus on were the screens a player would normally encounter when loading into a game. Using references from the Game UI Database was critical, as their library of UI screens is expansive in both games and the number of screens. The most eye-opening part of the site was realizing just how expansive UI goes in game design, forcing me to consider screens I never thought about needing to design. Based on a few games I have played, I can look at their UI screens for my research and incorporate them into my own. Several examples of screens and why I chose them are listed. References I used were based on already released horror games.

Title Screen

My idea for the menu is to keep it dark, minimal, and quiet, but as the player progresses through the game, the menu style will evolve and become lighter, brighter, and warmer. As the player would come into the game to play for the first time, I imagined it closer to how Little Nightmares or Dead Space opens with their title screens. Little Nightmares provides two title screens for their game, giving more variety, while Dead Space only has one before going into the next option screens.

For the main menu I wanted an image to be the main focus, with the menu options being off to the side and minimal. The best example that I could find was from A Plague Tale: Requiem or Alien: Isolation.