BODEGA BADDIES
GSU PantherDev, Spring 2023
Bodega Baddies was one of the first projects for PantherDev in which I exclusively worked on designing user interface elements and the overall user experience—and still to this day one of my favorite projects to have had the pleasure of collaborating on due to the user interface being heavily inspired by the nostalgia of old-school Windows internet browsers and the pastel-esque color scheme that I was working with for this project. Despite the setbacks that the team behind this project (including myself) has had to face in terms of having to narrow down the initial scope a lot (I’ve included elements pertaining to said initial scope in this section), we still came out at the end with an arcade-style game that’s both genuinely fun to play and aesthetically vibrant to a fault and I came out of the project with some equally vibrant user interface elements to showcase in this section!
All of my work on this project was produced using the software Inkscape and a lot of the references given to me for my work on the user interface assets came from old Windows interfaces dating back to the XP (and even 95) eras of the operating system. The given color scheme for a lot of my assets consisted of mainly pastel colors (pinks and purples), though when I was initially discussing the color palette with the rest of the project team, we had incorporated some blues into the initial designs. While this didn’t end up making the cut for the final production, I still imagine what could have been if we had more than just the pink and purple color schemes for a lot of the user interface assets that I created. I also suggested the idea of players being able to switch between the two color schemes as desired, but due to time and scope constraints on the project, we had to scrap that idea too and stick to a static color for each and every UI element on screen.
If you wish to check out the game and play it for yourself, click anywhere here!
Project Prototype Elements
These health bar iterations never made it into the final iteration of the game due to a rework of the project's scope, but this is a short glimpse at what could have been!
As can be implied from the elements making up the health bars, the project was meant to have a secondary mechanic in the form of a fighting minigame (hence the name of the game)
Final Project Elements
The blue window variant never made it into the final iteration since we decided to go with just the pinks & purples, but I did this anyways as a callback to the initial concept.
In the case of the window elements which have buttons included on them, I was also tasked with creating a variant of these without the buttons so that the buttons could be implemented on their own into the project build.
Same case as the title window above :)
We managed to get a fully functioning leaderboard implemented into the project's final build, and it was... certainly an interesting time to say the least...
...Which is why this element in particular was also included for the project! Any names (as long as they weren't filtered out, which is also something that was implemented by the programming team) inputted here would show up on the leaderboard if their score made the cut.
