I’ll first take this opportunity to introduce myself - my name is NielVredeveldt. I have been working on this project from the verybeginning, first as an environmental artist and now as the InteractionDesigner here at TCOS. For the ones who are not familiar with the term‘interaction designer’, it has a lot to do with usability. I try tomake the game more user-friendly. As you can imagine, the main toolthrough which people interact with the game mostly is the Userinterface. It’s a daunting task to make navigating TCOS gold a pleasantexperience for everyone and creating the actual GUI consumes most of mytime. I also work on the movement system, the combat system, playercontrols and all other combat feedback.

In this little article I’ll try to explain one of the game parts Iam responsible for here at Spellborn: this is all user interface art.

You can divide the interface art into 5 different groups:

- GUI Windows:
These are all interaction windows present in the Chronicles of Spellborn gold, for example Quest log, Friends’ list, Guild window, Skillbook, Inventory window, etc.

- HUD: (Heads Up Display)
These are all fixed interface elements present on your screen whileplaying. For example, Player Avatar window, Mini map, Body Slots,Combat bar etc.

- Icons:
All equipment, quest items, resources and consumables have icons.We need to create thousands of icons, so that players can recognize anitem when browsing through the inventory or shop. Also, for example,navigating through combat (skills) and interacting with NPCs requiresspecific icons.

- World maps
When navigating the Spellborn universe, a map can be very useful.All maps are divided in shard maps and those are divided in separateareas. These maps are all drawn by hand.

- Additional GUI art
Sometimes unique interface art is needed, for examples shop interiors, loading screens, game launcher, website stuff, etc.

The Spellborn Design Style
Because Spellborn has a distinctive art style, I also try tocapture this in the GUI. The easiest way is to achieve this is to usethe twirls and bends that are frequently seen in the Spellbornuniverse, for it makes the GUI rich with detail. There is one downsideto this though: the earlier design I have made proved to be heavy onperformance (beta 1) and we ended up redoing it all, for playing thegame when your machine renders at 5 frames a second did not seem a verygood option. You still can see some parts of that design version in theTCOS website layout.