ModBots
Lead UI Designer | Rigging Artist | Animator
3rd-Person Action Roguelike
May 2021 - Aug 2021
Team Size: 18
ModBots is a third-person arena rogue-like in which players play as robots fighting through randomized arena layouts against hordes of grunt robots and a larger gladiator. As the players advance, they gain upgrades and weapons to enhance their abilities to fight and survive.
Game Trailer
Hexagons: Maintaining A Visual Motif
ModBots' gameplay largely revolves around the floor of the robot gladiator arena in which the game takes place.
The floor, consisting of an array of hexagonal floor tiles, would shift in between every wave of enemies, changing its layout.
As the lead UI Designer on the development team, I made the decision to lean into the idea of basing the UI around hexagons as a nod to the importance of the shifting arena floor.
Robot Gladiator Arena Floor
The first UI work I did was for the game system after which ModBots was named, the collection of components that modify player stats. Using hexagons as a design inspiration, I came up with an icon for one of these mods called "Piston Overdrive".
Mod Icon
I approached the rest of the mod icons to which I was assigned using the same design motif, making sure that the border remained hexagonal. This motif made its way into the rest of the UI assets that I created, including the lobby UI and the majority of the in-game UI.
Base movement speed increased by 10% (+5% per stack)
Gain passive heal of 1hp/3sec (+1hp/3sec per stack)
Base Attack speed increased by 5% (+2% per stack)
Increase maximum health by 50hp
Kills generate 5hp (+1 per stack)
Melee attack damage increased by 10% (+5% per stack)
Axe attack damage increased by 10% (+5% per stack)
Jump height increased by 15% (+5% per stack)
Animation: My Role As An Animator
Early in ModBot's development, after the shifting floor system had been completed and programmers had moved onto combat mechanics, the team ran into an issue regarding the lack of an animator. With the artists on the team occupied with other areas of the game, I stepped in as an artist and began creating a temporary boss gladiator model while the other was still in-progress.
The Robot Gladiator design that I quickly came up with was crude since it was meant to only be a stand-in during development. I modeled, weight painted, rigged, and made only a handful of necessary animations to have basic functionality in-game.
Melee
Missile Attack
Walk
Death
Old Gladiator Animations
The final Robot Gladiator model had gotten completed later on in development. As at this point in the project the team had not yet onboarded another animator, so I became responsible for weight painting, rigging, and animating this robot gladiator model as well.
Walk
Impact
Jump
Death
New Gladiator Animations