Alone in the Dark by Pieces Interactive & THQ Nordic

Internship

Duration: July-October  2023. 

During my time as an intern for Pieces Interactive, I did a lot of invisible work for the  UI of Alone in the Dark, such as making menus scale as intended and making sure they worked properly with localized languages. I also revamped the Objectives menu, worked on a couple of UI animations and a puzzle with some particular localization challenges. In addition, I also made mockups for the character select screen, overlays for picking up items and changes to the the map that never made it to the game. Some of the stuff I made is lost to time, but below are some videos and screenshots of stuff I worked on. 

I gave the Objectives tab a layout makeover, unfortunately there's only an old mockup I can show of what it looked like before I came in. Mine to the right.

Here are a couple of screenshots of the tutorial modal I made, based on the shape used for some of the elements in the settings menus. In future projects I will be leaving some more space between the text and the edge of the box when making new modals.

Another before/after, this time of the Load Game menu. Mine to the right. I made small but effective changes considered to be an improvement.

Please excuse the very poor resolution, this was zoomed in pretty far to more easily showcase the issues with the scaling before and after my work on it. This is what I meant by 'invisible' work, you really don't notice it at all if it works correctly but it's very obvious when it doesn't. This was applied to every part of the different settings menus; options, Load/Save game etc.    

Spoiler! There's a different gun! I made the animation for switching between hand guns. (I think I also wrote this particular tutorial text now that I think about it.) 

This is a part of a puzzle that had some challenges regarding localization. Because the text is in the texture, they wanted to find a different way to localize than making one texture for each language, and this is what we came up with. 

The map was a big project I worked on. The left screenshot was my starting point. When I stopped working on it it looked like the middle one. In the released game it's somewhere in between. 

The blue/pink colors always seemed out of place to me considering the rest of the game's colors, and the map lacked consideration for color blindness. The screenshot on the right was a suggestion I made for the discovered/fully explored visuals of the map. With that one I also worked on taking readability for colour blind folks into account with the different patterns connected to the different states of exploration, so the colours wouldn't be the only differentiating factor. It unfortunately never made it to the game. 

Something I also worked a lot on for the map was the sizing of the text to make the localized languages fit. It's a real challenge to make different languages fit into the same spaces, particularly when one language uses two characters for a word and another use ten.