When open-world games became all the rage, companies began to experiment boldly with the genre. The Saboteur, by random example, took place in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, casting you in the role of Sean, an Irish racecar driver caught in the wartime furor. While that premise stands tantalizingly tall on its own, the extra special conceit to The Saboteur was that occupied areas were in black and white and red; liberated areas arrayed in dazzling color. Now, creating a user interface for an open-world game is difficult enough — but crafting one that works in a half-monochrome game is a Herculean feat.
And that was exactly what Electronic Arts asked me to do! Making the interface work in all conditions took a bit of doing, but eventually we settled on a design and aesthetic that was “all-terrain”. Because of its stunning vision of a wartorn Paris, the Saboteur went on to win Inside Gaming’s 2007 Best Art Direction.
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Genre: open-world, action, racing
Platform: Console & PC
Duties: conceptualization, user experience, user interface, wireframing, iconography, animation, Actionscript coding, effects, asset creation, motion graphics
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