At the time, the way information in the Age of Empires 4 front end was presented fairly cerebrally, and so we decided to try to explore some options to present things more visually.
This was an anatomy breakdown of a complete Coat of Arms. The engineers could now visually understand every aspect of a Coat of Arms and create the code to support the feature.
The system for having a modular customizable Coat of Arms in Age of Empires 4 had to be designed. This concept helped people visualize at least at a baseline a variety of different parts that went into what made a complete Coat of Arms. It also helped scope out how many options we might need.
We knew that players could possibly change the Coat of Arms into strange combinations of colors. This was an exploration to try and find the more obscure/strange color combinations, and whether it’d visually break the art.
We didn’t want a complete color picker for the Coat of Arms customization, we wanted to have specific color sets for specific parts of the Coat of Arms. So no matter what the player picked, the color structure and anatomy of the Coat of Arms would still work.
Early sketches of Medals icons which the player would earn by completing Challenges. Designing it this way allowed us to see how the Medals would progress, becoming more elaborate in the later ranks. As well, we could figure out thematically what each of the elements meant to the franchise.
Concepts to explore the render style for the Challenge Medals. We had discovered this skeuomorphic look wasn’t quite right for the Medals however.
We explored what a visual representation of Player Progression could be like. When you visited the screen, what would the player see and feel would could reflect the game’s art direction, but also communicate the player’s rank.