Faithfully Porting a Beloved Family of Point-and-Click RPGs from PC to Console
Baldur’s Gate 1, 2, and all of its DLC were ported the three major consoles in a single title, offering players a classic Dungeons & Dragons experience whose focus is on rich storytelling. The challenge from a UX perspective lay in the fundamental difference between how a player interacts with a game using a mouse and keyboard vs. a gamepad.
Animated mockups showing the game in motion helps with visualizing the UX flow, allowing stakeholders and product owners to make informed decisions based on high-fidelity representations of the end-product.
With an iterative approach to prototyping interaction elements, costly developer overhead was reduced by delivering not only the art assets, but specific implementation guidelines with a well-defined end-goal. In support of adapting the player’s input scheme from a mouse and keyboard to a gamepad, the visual cues needed to be accessible and on-brand.
The visual language for gamepad input was designed in such a way as to be applicable to the game’s library of existing 2D assets in a consistent manner. All button and icon animations are done with pre-rendered art for each state (such as hovered, pressed, inactive, etc.) meaning several hundred items were in need of modification.
In addition to the in-game UI assets, console certification required additional artwork for console system UI, store pages, and promotional channels, with each use case having strict specifications for image size, safe zones, and best practices.
