The goal was to create a baseball experience with authenticity, personality, and polish.
Iterating a yearly product can be very demanding work, especially with a small team and limited budget. Dreams are often crushed when the product plan meets scope and team composition. We were lucky in the 2018 development cycle to start early with a bigger team and a plan to massively improve the game to be modern in look and feel.
CREDITS:
Producer
Jason Teirstein
Role
Art Direction, UX/UI Direction, Motion Direction
Collaborators
Clockwork Monkey, UX/Visual Design
David Mayzis, UI Motion
David Miranda, Technical Art
Kamil Durzynski, Environmental Art
Zak Schiller, Character Art
Ingame Unity prototype with custom subsurface scattering shader.
Pre-production
We started with research and development for characters, cloth, and environments.
We wondered how much of this tech we could put on console and maintain high framerate.
We refreshed UX to a modern style and painted a UI that highlights our athletes and their statistics.
Since we added a few new features in 2018, we increased the ease of interaction and kept content on the surface. Our broadcast inspired graphics package adds an extra touch to the presentation by echoing and evolving on the traditional scorebug, interstitial, and scoring sequence.
UI motion design production targets.
We've upped the authenticity level with hundreds of headscans, animations, and gear that creates the unique look tailored to a specific athlete.
We went from 3 basic character models to a blended system that allowed for more realism and accuracy. New logo, intro video, and cover athlete for 2018 and it’s a wrap.
