planning
I use a program called Obsidian to take notes. If you aren’t already using it, I highly recommend it. With Obsidian, I created spreadsheets and tables of the JIRA tickets I had been assigned over my time at Amazon Games/Blind Squirrel. I then absorbed the news releases New World had posted during that time, and meshed these two together, forming a comprehensive guide for me to see what content was released when. I then used this document to form a “kanban” / Trello-like series of lists so I could move those my projects around until I was happy with how they were divided up.
There are a few levels of work that I did for AGS… and some I wanted to show off – others just don’t require as much artistry from the UI Artist. So I came up with two formats – One based off of two horizontal / wide frames in one image – and the other a tilt-shifted image. (The tilt-shift effect is something I made in Photoshop: I just made a smart object, distorted it, added some blur and then masked that blur as a smart filter. It’s non-destructive, so if I just click into the image, I see the pieces within that image as flat artwork, in layers, that I can compose and re-compose without issue. The latter effect I came to think of as a “you get the idea” effect. I used it for the work that didn’t require as much artistry… leaving the other content for the the clearer format.
After producing the format and all of the images, I worked on the website. This was my bread and butter a few years back, so it was interesting to come back to my old stomping grounds. I really turned this format on its ear for it to work appropriately… You’ll notice the navigation sort of shifts depending on the page, rather than being consistently the four main areas you see on the homepage. I made the navigation out of submenus, inline-coding those little arrows, etc.
Seasons 4 and 5
a
b
Events
c