As an addendum to the other post I made about my work on Deus Ex: Breach, here are a few things I also lent a hand to, mostly on the UI / motion design side of things.

It’s mostly three elements of the game, one of which is rather in your face while you might miss the two others if you blink. ^^

First off, the World Map:

Executive game designer René-Martin Pauze and lead game designer Richard Knight designed navigating between Deus Ex: Breach’s levels as a nod to Mankind Divided’s hacking system, since it thematically made the most sense, but it gradually evolved to emulate a more classic approach to level selection, namely Super Mario World.

I tried to accommodate both by retaining the constraints of the hacking system from Mankind Divided while adopting an isometric* perspective with a front facing camera.

Thematically, I saw this environment as being the Internet as seen through the NSN system that hackers use in the world of Deus Ex: Breach, with the secure servers emerging like icebergs, with a more solid, sturdy look to them.

I worked on paper in the beginning of the design process but eventually worked directly on the 3D assets and a bit of scripting, with the help of others who actually knew what they were doing.

The second element I wanted to talk about is something I’ve annoyed just about everyone on the team with and is virtually nowhere in the game: The ternary point counting system.

As the world of Breach is inside a machine and not meant to be interacted with directly by a human being, I felt it would be natural not to have alpha-decimal characters anywhere in the environment. At the same time, I also didn’t want to fall into cheesy territory with 1’s and 0’s, so I started to think about how a computer in that world would work.

Thinking about the key shape of the world being the triangle, I thought that a ternary system instead of a binary one could be a funny nod, a possibly sensible idea, and a way to make a visually interesting system.

After a bit of paper design, I ended up programming a clock that would display numbers in that system.

I’ve always had a thing for visual representations of time and different counting systems, so it was a fun thing to make, although we used it on a few props (I think?) and that’s about it. I had ideas for encrypting messages in the environment using that system, and the clock would have served as a Rosetta stone of some kind, but we never got around to making that. And for those curious, I programmed it with Processing, and you can find the code on GitHub.

Lastly, the very last thing I did for the project was a video for the stand alone version of the game, available on Steam.

Since we wouldn’t have any tie to Mankind Divided, that game’s intro video had to go and be replaced by something Breach specific. We didn’t have much time nor budget to make it, and I felt confident enough to try so I did.

I tried to put a twist on Mankind Divided’s own video, with the same focus on the protagonist’s face, but trying to illustrate the key concept behind the Ripper’s face, the digital Rorschach.

I made a few different versions of the mask with vector shapes in After Effects that I morphed into one another, and used that animation as a base to use with Plexus, a rather ubiquitous plug-in which specialty is to take vector or 3D assets and use their vertices as input to generate meshes that you can tweak and have evolve in a lot of ways. It’s hard to explain and definitely complex to master, but a lot of fun.

And there you have it! The fun bit being that I made this a one-minute loop, only for it to be on-screen for a grand total of 3 seconds, since on PC, we tend to avoid having these Press Start screens, so we auto-skip it…:D

While I started in the industry as a UI artist, I wouldn’t say graphic design is my strong suit, but I did my best trying to come up with designs that wouldn’t look too far below the high bar of Deus Ex:  Mankind Divided’s UI design made by Benoit Perreault and Damien Belleville. Not to mention, I have to thank the whole team for their constant feedback and ideas that enabled me to make these things despite being way out of my comfort zone. ^^

I hope you enjoyed it!