/Defence_Alliance_2

Defence Alliance 2 was a great Unreal Tournament 2004 (and later Killing Floor) mod, featuring class-based, cooperative assault-like gameplay against AI players. I had joined this modding team to work on creating UV maps, but as they announced their need for a GUI developer, I quickly took the task of designing and developing the new graphical user interface (my main area of interest) for their mod.

The workflow entailed creating the designs using Photoshop and Illustrator, and then implementing it using UnrealScript. It was a big challenge; even though I had worked with game GUIs and UnrealScript in the past, I hadn't done so as the member of a huge team, and I lacked experience in some aspects of game user interface design. Still, designing each screen widget and menu was a blast, and learning the intricacies of the legacy-code-ridden UT2k4 user interfaces classes was a huge but satisfying challenge.

In the end, hundreds of different screens were created for the mod, and at least from my experience, this was the most professionally-looking UT2k4 mod GUI out there. Some screens were mere reskins of the original GUI classes, but many were original designs that gave the mod its own identity.