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Astral Chain devblog update: "The Wide World of UI, Part II"

It's the little details that matter
by rawmeatcowboy
22 August 2019
GN Version 5.0

Platinum Games is back with the second part of their last Astral Chain devblog. This installment continues the deep dive into the game's user interface creation. It's insane how much thought Platinum puts into this stuff, but it really does bring the entire experience up a notch. Check out a bit from the blog below, then click over and read the full piece.

When a cutscene or other transition finishes and the main gameplay screen returns to your TV or console, the HUD elements have to come back in smoothly. That’s where the animations I’m writing about today come on.

The HUD is different from the menu, in that you don’t directly interact with it as a player. But there’s a lot of information that the game needs to show you, so you’ll be seeing the HUD a lot, from the very beginning to the very end. I knew that these animations had to be the best quality I could manage.

I set aside a lot of time to gather references and decide on a design direction for these animations. This is a usual part of the process, of course, but I knew that neglecting it would be a fast track to subpar, unconvincing animations. So I took these initial planning stages particularly seriously for this project.

Full blog here