The vision of the art director Shaun was a highly conceptual immersive 3d environment where the UI for the main menu would exist. Because the UX lead wasn’t slated to work on the main menu for quite some time we needed to keep the work high level but make sure we wouldn’t be blocking any feature development later in production. We also needed to be sure we weren’t overly ambitious in what we were attempting because of so many cross team dependencies and technical questions.

CONCEPT

I worked through various concepts with Shaun that were heavily influenced by Ash Thorp, G Munk, and Jayse Hansen with more of a focus on organic layouts. The main conceptual pillar for the visual targets was a highly complex operating system integrated with the solider(s) that contained various elements and motion to give the user the impression that the operating system was endlessly processing but without any specific known intent.

The OS would be based in 3d space around a composition of soldiers in various frozen moments and interaction would influence the motion of the elements as well as the motion of the cameras in the scene.

PRODUCTION

For production we ended up with a more straight forward implementation with two main pages in the UI and shared components between scenes that would allow for transformative animation while never leaving the main menu shell scene. The UI was angled in 3d using the UI editor but remained conservative in order to not impact usability.

CONCEPT SKETCHES

Stewart Roud and myself began explorations early by storyboarding basic high level ideas and presenting those ideas upward once the art director was happy with them. Following presentations and discussions we began to work on more focused layout sketches accounting for some of the legacy UX from Black Ops 2 before we knew of what the 3rd title would call for. We then settled on a ‘frozen moment in time’ direction for the concept process.

CREATE A CLASS

The CAC was an example of a more utilitarian menu and the UX lead wanted to be able to make content king and showcase more of the amazing 3d weapon assets that Treyarch artists produce. A parent menu displays your load-out and customizing your load-out then takes the user to the CAC menu with shared components.