A few months ago, I saw the coming soon advert for "Guilty Gear Strive" and I was watching a hilarious Anime called "Food Wars!" I was very inspired by the ridiculous nature and fun art style of each IP that I started a Chef PVP UI interface. I mocked this up after a few hours:
After playing "Biomutant" and having the new "My Hero Academia: The greatest Hero" game hit the market , I was doubly inspired and decided to expand on my mock with an inventory/upgrade screen to go with PVP mock. The biggest challenge was to match the visual art style. I create a lot of realistic and cartoony-styled games, so taking on a Japanese Anime aesthetic was a challenge that would force me to create a balance of detail and color harmony while making it look like it belonged in the genre, and feeling like a believable game interface.
UI Wireframe
UI Mockup
When designing my UX system underneath, I pulled from a lot of different sources, Biomutant, My Hero, etc. I wanted to keep the upgrade system simplified. The upgrade requirement is a "Recipe" so the Player would focus on collecting the ingredients to make food Resource icons that would then feed into the Utensil/Weapon's specific attributes.
Keeping with the theme, I would have made the upgrades in line with the food pyramid and associated those with Weapon abilities. Proteins for strength and sugars for speed, for example. This allows for the player to pour their resources into different recipes, that would then feed into different weapon attributes, hopefully making the player feel like they have a lot of agency over their "custom" weapon.
I am having a lot of fun developing this mock up and I look forward to putting more time into it when I am free!