The Cricket 26 Score HUD
The Cricket 26 Score HUD
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The Cricket 26 HUD felt... different from other HUDs I've worked on previously. It felt so much more important to the whole vibe of the game. I think it's because, in a cricket broadcast, the score is taking up SO much of the screen and has so much information, rather than just a score. It's so central to the game, and has been central to the Big Ant Cricket games for many years before I came along.
This meant I had a base to work with, which was great! However, this base had been around for many years, and everyone who worked on it and remembered it was long gone, which wasn't so great. Alas, we move onwards!
Since the Score HUD already existed in our workspace, but didn't do what I needed it to do, and it didn't really follow the MVVM pattern either, I had to do a lot of reworking it. That's okay - it's a relic from when Big Ant was first starting to use XAML for our UI, so it's completely understandable that it wasn't fully fleshed out yet! It was a challenge to work through, but some of the things that were being used were features I didn't even know about - and now I don't think I could live without them. It was super cool to see how we used to do things, and such a great experience to be able to clean it up and adapt it for a more modern Cricket game.
My first hurdle was how many competitions and themes I would have to add. After some talking with designers, we decided there would be a limited number of layouts, and I would switch out elements based on the competition theme. Here's a quick rendition of the layouts that I just put together:
And here's some of the templates, all lined up together:
The amount of work that went into the design and implementation of the scoreboards is phenomenal. The artists did such a fantastic job with the design of these and they were so accomodating to my template constraints - it made the whole process so smooth and I couldn't be more grateful for the UI team and the support we give each other.
The scoreboards also needed to be able to expand and collapse - some people don't want to see all the effort I put into the scoreboard, and that's........fine..... But even so, the expansion and collapsing animation was super fun to make, so I forgive them.
Since the scoreboard is so dynamic, we had a bunch of custom elements laying around that I reworked to work with our new template system. Here's me cycling through them and showcasing the animations:
I'm super grateful for the base I had to work with - it provided such a helpful blueprint and made the implementation of the modern HUD so much more smooth. It taught me a lot and I'm so glad I was able to improve upon it and create a really cool final product, and something that can be built upon for future games - not just cricket.
About Cricket 26
About Cricket 26
"Cricket 26 - The Official Game of the Ashes"
"Featuring the all-new Management Career, a bigger and better Pro Team, in-depth Ashes mode, and expanded control on and off the field from enhanced gameplay and in-depth strategies - Cricket 26 is The Ultimate Showdown."
Working at Big Ant Cricket 26 has been one of my favourite experiences so far, because the menus in this game are just so FUN! I learned so much on this project and was able to dip my toes into the implementation side of things a little more.
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