Magus Florum | UIDesigner Portfolio

Magus Florum is a puzzle platformer where a young wizard uses plant magic to rescue his lost feline friends. The title, meaning "Druid of Flowers," fits the game perfectly. It was my favourite undergraduate project, as I enjoyed the entire process. As Lead Designer, I had creative control over the UI and applied skills I’d learned before. Not everything made it into the final game, but it was still a great experience.

Game Overview Trailer

Wireframes are a very important step for me. It helps me to visualise the screen and how certain elements will look. I can also then show this to other on the project and get their opinions on how something is looking. I like to get others opinions as its great for picking up on things that I may have missed or getting feedback on placement, ect.

Wireframes

Magus Florum Main Menu

I decided to go with cats paws for the main menu buttons as it fit in our games theme.

Magus Florum HUD

I wanted to keep the HUD basic with a simple health, mana bar and pop ups for status effects. I also added a pause button in this version.

Magus Florum HUD Annotations

Magus Florum Pause Menu

I liked the way the cat paws looked for the menu and wanted to do something similar.
I sketched around and came up with a cat head for the pause menu. I also liked the quirky name 'Pawsed' instead of 'Paused'

Magus Florum Settings Menu

I wanted to keep this menu fairly basic to be mindful to the art and tech teams, whilst also keeping the important information clear.

Magus Florum Controls Screen

I again kept this basic but wanted to add some visuals to help players understand the controls better, rather than just reading text.

Magus Florum Level End Screen

I wanted to give the player a score based stats screen that helps increase playability of levels to get higher scores. I stuck with the cat theme and play on words to design this screen.

I’m no artist but I am able to use photoshop to create a few basic concepts. I wanted to step away from basic health and mana bars so I took the time to create some concepts. I recently learnt how to create new shaped progress bars for my final year project and wanted to use this in the UI for Magus Florum.

Basic UI Concept Art

Health Bar Concepts

I decided to step away from the cat theme and focus on our secondary thematic, plants. I drew some basic concepts to show what the health bar could look like.

Health Bar Concepts

When the player starts to lose health I wanted the plants to look withered and decayed, as if they were dying. To achieve this I used a selection of brown tones to make the plants a rotting, lack of water look. I was really happy with how these turned out.