designing and thinking about how the game systems are presented to the player.

the reticle is very important to rewilding, so ive spent a lot of time trying to get it right. my high level goal was to design something that dynamically gives the player the information they need to decide the majority of moment to moment actions without taking their eyes away from the center of the screen. at a glance, it can visually show the player what objects are interactable with what tools & how many times they can use a given tool with their current amount of biomass (# of pieces in the aperture). for the plant tool, this tells you specifically how many of any given plant you are able to sow given your current resources. 

After feeling good about the reticle, i started to design other parts of the interface around it: tool selection, tool-mode selection, etc. I slowly became drawn to this idea that the main reticle can be a focal point for the surrounding ui, and began to use it not only for gameplay related interactions but also for interacting with the HUD itself. When you’re scrubbing through your available plants, the outer reticle ring morphs into an acute arc to follow the selection and the pieces inside update as the selection is changing to give the player a quick idea of how big or small a commitment any given plant is, before they even select it, helping inform their decision without the need for numbers or fractions.

if you can’t tell, i’ve found immense joy in iterating on this system over the years and honing into an interface that not only looks appealing visually but more importantly functionally serves the needs of the player in an elegant way.