Te Hekenga

Roles: UX/UI Tech Art Game Art
Employer: ARA Journeys
Timeframe: 6 weeks (for my involvement)

Te Hekenga is a geolocation-based educational game that teaches students about ancestral ocean exploration and migration.

In this project I took what I’d learned from previous Tuwhiri projects to create a new UI skin, icons, and story illustrations.

UI Design

Tools: Figma Photoshop Unity

My task for was to take the supplied art direction from an exhibition aimed at adults, cohesively tweak it to appeal to kids, and apply it to the existing UI foundations from a previous project.

To make the supplied art direction (left) feel more kid-friendly, I subtly brightened the colours, used a handwritten font, and added organic textures to frame edges & backgrounds.

The final textured UI as implemented in the game.

Tech Art

Tools: Unity Shadergraph Illustrator Mapbox

Implementing the organic aesthetic of the UI required a custom UI shader and Mapbox style.

I used the Shadergraph I’d built for Tuwhiri’s UI as a base, and made some workflow improvements based on my experience using it in the previous project.

This shader saved a lot of time when producing UI content - the same image could have different edges & overlays automatically applied in-engine.

After the complex implementation of Tuwhiri’s map style, I decided to look for more vector-friendly ways to make Te Hekenga’s map look organic. Inspired by the project’s font & the background pattern from the supplied art direction, I used a mixture of tiled drawn patterns and carefully chosen implemented strokes over a paper texture background to give it a hand-drawn style.

From the original style, to the vector-paintover in Illustrator, to Mapbox Studio Implementation. The live style can be viewed in the Te Hekenga app.

Game Art

Tools: Procreate Photoshop

A tight production schedule meant that I had around 3 weeks to create over 20 illustrations. To achieve this, I developed a strategy to repurpose & recolour parts of the illustrations I was working on.

With this strategy I was able to create an additional 15 story illustrations in approximately two weeks, and successfully kept the deadline!