I’ve played many hours at Genshin Impact. I truly love this game and I believe it has the power to make this genre of game popular in the North American market. It's a well rounded mix of so many different games that it can't really be explained. Lots of what makes Genshin Impact good are things that we usually link with bad practices and bad games. An energy system that limits the time you can play a day, a system of loot boxes that have a very low chance of giving you the character you want to play. But the game is so masterfully executed, that all those aspect become part of the identity of the game and bring something very different to the table.
I shouldn't like Genshin Impact as much as I do.
Steven Messner - PC GAMER
I enjoyed playing this game so much that I decided to tweek some of the menu features in order to make it more clear for the viewer when it comes to navigation in the many different menus that the game has to offer. I also created a prototype of a character selection menu.
Tools used : XD, Illustrator, Photoshop
This game has A LOT of menus, and it can be hard for both new and experimented players to navigate through them. The main reason why the menu is such a challenge is because the game is available on almost all the devices you could imagine except Xbox, which makes it very hard to design menus. A mobile player will use his finger, a PC player will use his mouse and the PS4 player will use his controller.
Facing this situation, I decided to stick with the main idea of the circle menu used in the game for one of the menus, but expend it so that the player only has this menu to understand.
Here's what I did.
I first had to hand draw every icons found in the different menus so that I could use them in my design. There are A LOT of icons in this game, but they are rather minimalist so it was pleasant to create.
I then created a hierarchy based on the importance of the icons, and grouped the icons that would share a similar purpose.
This would come out vital information has it would guide me to decide how many slots I want in my menu.
I came with up these 4 distinct categories that are used a lot throughout the game :
Shop, Characters, Objectifs and Social
Has they are the most important, I decided to put them at the easiest positions to reach on the controller, which are :
Top, bottom, left and right
Here is the final version of the menu.
Go ahead, try it out by yourself !
👇
A big part of the success of this game is the characters design. I had fun creating a small character selection menu. Feel free to learn more about some of the characters of the game by interacting with it.
👇