Bike Unchained
Enabling gamers to live the pro rider dream on the world's best biking trails
Enabling gamers to live the pro rider dream on the world's best biking trails
Red Bull Bike is a mobile action sports game that allows players to escape into the life of a pro mountain bike rider. Players complete a series of challenges on world famous biking trails to collect a crew of characters and compete with the world's best in beautifully characterized environments.
I worked closely with another designer over 7 months to design the end to end UI for the game. Both of us collaborated on the UX flow and visual style guide. I created wireframes for various features such as the leaderboards, created mockups, designed iconography, and implemented the UI in Unity.
The UI uses geometric shapes and bold white elements against carefully balanced dark background visuals.
HOME: The central hub to the game that uses a dynamically changing environment to set the tone for the game.
MY CREW: Customize riders and their bikes. Animated UI hints guide players a level deeper into rider & bike customization.
CAMPAIGN: The central solo gameplay feature that uses a map layout to access the various tracks of the game.
CONTESTS: The core PvP Feature of the game, where players compete against one another and rank up on the leaderboard.
We kept the UI visual style simple and efficient for a number of reasons.
Traditionally, mobile games use art heavy assets for the UI that can be a challenge to modify without completely reworking the majority of assets. Seeing as the pace of the mobile gaming industry is very quick, with new trends and viral hits emerging every few months, we needed to ensure that the game's UI would be easy to adapt to design changes during development and beyond launch.
With a clean UI style, we wanted to make sure we still had beautiful imagery within the game for players to appreciate. The UI's simplicity was deliberately designed to be complimentary to the striking visuals seen in the background & character art.
With a variety of different game modes and trail modes, we needed to communicate these differences within the UI itself. We focused on representing the elaborate mechanics of the game as simply as possible to allow both hardcore and casual gamers to feel immersed in the game.
We focused on designing in phases and abiding to strict milestones with the design process. Overall, we were able to meet our deadlines on time and stayed on schedule with the UI design process. What was important though, was that we were able to stick to a schedule, as well as account for major game design changes that came to us midway through development.
We handled change through a stepwise process. First, we would analyze the impact of the change, and document how it would affect the current state of the game. After analysis, we would scope the change to minimize the amount of rework to existing features, and then proceed to wireframe, mockup, and implement the change. We kept our process well documented and concise in our design specification, to create transparency within the team as to what the state of the design was.
Red Bull; Roadhouse Interactive
UX Design; Interaction Design; Visual Design; UI Implementation
Shery Sumal; Erynn Tomlinson
OmniGraffle; Illustrator; Photoshop; Unity