WORK FOR

Forza Motorsports 6 DLC

EMPLOYER

Turn 10 Studios Microsoft

DIRECTION

Rory Reich + Nic Johnson

As the amazing team and I wrapped up work on the Forza Porsche Expansion and ongoing Apex work we began work on the Nascar Expansion. Similar brand limitations and guidelines applied when looking to foster a major brand within another while residing parallel with another unique brand expansion. We knew that the Nascar Expansion would feature a unique career, and we wanted it to be more bespoke than the Porsche Expansion as we would have additional resources. We also were aware that within the Nascar brand there existed breathing room to explore. Working with the Project and Concept Art Directors I generated mood boards and key art inspired by Nascar’s own promo content that would serve as a rough heading for the career content (videos and graphic art) that needed to be generated.

CAREER CONTENT

While helping to give feedback and direction on the career video content being directed offsite we worked through iterations and aligned ourselves to the content opting to emulate a rough 3 color screen printed style we could apply across our screens while not jarring the user from the by now familiar UX. We felt this created a friendly contrast to the clean visuals in the rest of the game and aligned itself with the rest of the career content well. We designed brands to match the travel (not era) theme in the Nascar Career and used pieces of plates supplied by the motion designers to create poster content using cars we captured in the final weeks before launch.

CAREER UI

The Nascar Expansion would itself also have its own tab in the main menu we owned the content for. In precious rounds working with Rory, Nic and Scott (the career designer) we were able to select a key color from the nascar brand and work through some UI variants while remaining in lock step with UI implementation and engineering in order to ensure what we were planning was achievable given the time constraints. Because our main screens in the UI were still using shared components and were comprised of a header, body, and footer controls we kept our designs templatized. The Nascar Expansion also served as our introduction of the Quickstop UI used during pit stops.

TUTORIAL CONTENT AND MODS

With the new Nascar expansion came new mechanics and features, like drafting and quickstops (pit stops) which required some simple narration to explain. Video content proved itself too costly so we opted to have Noah Kaarbo at Ozone Interactive design tutorial screens with myself and the Project Art Director art directing. We wanted to ensure a cohesive experience through Nascar while at the same time planning for generic content within the screens as to not impact brands with stylistic treatments. New sets of mods were also offered with the expansion, which meant they needed their own unique updates again handled by Ozone Interactive.

ADDITIONAL NASCAR CONTENT

The new initial experience loading sequence, introduction to the career, career end titles, and achievements all needed to be refreshed as well with Ozone designing the achievement iconography and footer graphics.