Seán Conroy - Potions & Spells

ROLE

Animator, UI Designer and VFX Artist

Potions & Spells was an exciting project at Rogue Harbour Game Studio where I had great opportunity to deepen my understanding of Spine pipelines. In addition to working on the UI with Felipe de Almeida, I was also in charge of defining and creating our entire 2D animation pipeline for the game. I learned a lot of new things during this process and had a chance to create some wonderful animations for this cosy game!

In the galleries below, you'll find a collection of screenshots and videos that showcase the systems and animations that I created for this prototype, featuring the wonderful artwork of Cody Schroder and Eva Toker.

Animated Mockup for Marketing Test

I was initially tasked with creating an animated mockup of how the game would look in motion, which was used for market research and pitching to different publishers and investors. It proved to be quite popular!

The overall UI design of Potions & Spells was quite a bit different from the games I'd previously worked on while at Rogue Harbour Games Studio. The design of the game meant that, for the most part, UI elements would all be overlaid on the main map view. This was chosen as we wanted the map and its elements to be the main focus of the game, so the UI needed to leave parts of the map visible at all times.

Below are example mockups from key UI elements.

Main Screen

Main Screen (Menu Open)

Room Popup

Outfit Popup

Furniture Popup

Building Popup

Recipe Popup

Build Popup

Goals & Achievements Popup

Furniture Shop Popup

Shop Popup

PIR Popup

Welcome Back Popup

Settings (Options)

Settings (Mail)

Additionally, the UI team regularly created animated mockups to show more complex or nuanced UI elements more clearly during the mockup stage. These animations helped give a more detailed preview of some of the UX flows during development, which also helped the engineering team better coordinate and prepare for implementation.

One of the main draws to this game was the colourful cast of witchy coven members you could find. Early on in the development of the game, I was tasked with crated a reskinnable Spine rig that would allow us to have a variety of outfits, accessories and hairstyles.

Using Spine's Skin system, I created a rig that would easily allow players to mix and match these pieces to personalise their witches. We could also provide a wide variety of skin, iris and hair colours be recolouring the rig's images in Unity.

Below, you'll find a video which demonstrates some of the outfits and hairstyles that you could find:

Depending on the witch's hairstyle, the rig would also adapt to work with certain hats, raising/lowering the hat and occluding any excess hair to work with the chosen hairstyle. Below, you'll find a few examples:

All hairstyles needed to work with the various hats found in the game.

In addition to the witches, I was also responsible for the rigging and animating of the myriad of buildings, ingredient stations and more that could be found in the game. Below, you'll find some of my favourites: