Identity
Visual Direction
3D
Whilst at Playside Studios, I worked for several weeks alongside two junior UI artists on Meta’s Horizon Worlds VR experience. As one of their key development partners, Playside helped to create several ‘worlds’ within the broader Horizon’s ecosystem.
As a senior artist, I helped to set the tone and style for the visuals of Horizon Worlds: Survive, a survival crafting game for the Meta Quest 3, set on a remote fantasy island. The target audience of the game was young, so the visuals lean upon chunky, bold and friendly shapes and colours. This approach also fit the confines of the Horizon Engine, which was still in it’s very early stages during the beginning of Survive’s development.
After establishing the style and mentoring the two artists in 3D and the Adobe Suite, they were able to build out the larger UI systems and artwork that exist in the game today.
To help create depth within the VR landscape of Survive, I created a 3D icon workflow in Blender that could be used to take an icon from vector software like Adobe Illustrator, through to a chunky stylised 3D model ready for a final paint over in Photoshop. This way we were able to add depth but control things like colour and lighting to create a more handmade feel.
To help maintain consistency with the icons and eventually the UI, I created a guide to shape language that would support the game’s themes and environments. To round out the styleguide I created a robust palette of bright natural colours and a typography system that would support increased legibility and accessibility.
In order to clearly communicate what are often complex systems and actions within VR, I created a comprehensive set of controller glyphs as well as illustrations of the controllers themselves for use in onboarding and tutorials.
CREDITS
Game Direction
Jamie Bentley
Production
Jono Miles
Michelle Barnes
Game Design
Justin Dong
Visual Direction
Christian Orkibi
UI Support
Roxanne Phan
Linh Linh
