Playground Games / 2018 – 2021
On Forza Horizon 5, I worked alongside the UI Art team, led by Richard Wheeler, bringing all of Forza Horizon 4’s core features up to date for the sequel. Many of these features included UI I had designed for Forza Horizon 4’s Live Service, and updating them for Forza Horizon 5 gave me and opportunity to improve Quality Of Life for returning players. This game also had an increased focus on accessibility, where I was able to become an advocate for this throughout development. Many of the conversations and discoveries we made in our accessibility investigations aided Microsoft with their attitudes towards inclusive UX design in games going forward.
Event Poster UI
The biggest improvement I was able to make for Forza Horizon 5 was a complete re-design of the information and UI displayed on Event Posters. Previously event posters in Forza Horizon 4 had been a port of the same UI from Forza Horizon 3, with additional information core to the game’s Live Service and UGC tools placed onto the layouts. Exacerbating the issue, there were multiple different poster archetypes in Horizon 4, which had information appear in inconsistent locations depending on the type of poster. This often created a cramped, difficult to read visual which added to cognitive load. The UI team at Playground were extremely keen to fix this going into the 5th game in the franchise.
Taking inspiration from competing games which featured standardised Event Tile layouts, we decided to ensure all Event Posters would have consistently placed information, putting the onus to provide visual variation purely on background artwork instead of pre-determined formatting set by engineers. This was a win all around, as the UX was better, it made the feature easier to implement, and also future proofed it for Live Service and beyond.
The work to address this actually started during Forza Horizon 4’s Live Service, where we trialled a new poster layout in the “Super7” game mode on the Challenge Cards. This ultimately started as the basis to streamline UGC information and prove the workload required by Engineers to get the posters updated, and proved out our theory that this would act as a future proof friendly implementation.
In-World Asset Art
As well as designing UI for Forza Horizon 5, I also contributed towards branding elements for the Horizon Festival in world. This included Bonus Boards, Festival Branding for the Baja Festival, and artwork for Checkpoint flags. The artwork used across these elements had deep ties to the game’s location, Mexico, leveraging the rich culture and varied art styles of the country in the branding for the Horizon Festival.
Adrian Cottrell 