Age of Conan UI
date
Aug 28, 2023
type
Project
year
2008
slug
age-of-conan-ui
status
Published
tags
Project
Game
UI
summary
A look back at my work as UI strike team lead.
My first job straight out of university was at Funcom in Oslo, Norway. As UI strike team lead I worked closely with the game director, art director and various designers to create a user interface that was both beautiful and functional. I created most of the art and had a team of 3 awesome programmers to handle the implementation.
There was a lot do be done, from the main interface, minimap, health indicators, inventory, game launcher, character creation, to the chat interface, guild management, trading post, item trading, speech bubbles, traits, world map, regionmaps, main menu, loading screen, quest journal, etc., etc.
I literally created thousands of concepts and visual ideas as the game was finding its final shape. I collected all the latest designs and information on a wiki on the intranet. These were super-productive and super-fun years!
Whenever a design was done I would split everything into parts and create an overview sheet like this to help with the implementation. And as you can tell, I was listening to the 🎵 Decemberists on that day in June 2007…
How do you make a piece of parchment resizable?
We didn’t use these types of portraits in the end, but I had a great time painting them:
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