The Killing Tree is a horror-themed Sims-like game. Playing as a tree demon haunting a patch of woods, the player grows their roots into the unsuspecting campers' cabin. You can spook the inhabitants with minor haunts to harvest their fear, which you can then use as fuel to grow even more roots. When you've fully infested an area of the house, you can use killer haunts to slay the humans before they escape!
This was created as part of the Global Game Jam 2023, which had the theme of "Roots".
I had the opportunity to collaborate with another UI/UX designer on this project. While she focused on the Start, Pause, and Settings menus, I focused solely on the game screen's layout and design as well as its art assets.
Given the short timeline of the jam and our own creative sensibilities, we decided to go for a retro look to match the film era we were taking inspiration from. The main themes I wanted to incorporate into the UI from this aesthetic were:
Our game was kind of like the Sims in that you had to manipulate events to get AI-controlled people to feel a certain way, but it was also like a city builder in that you had to invest resources in order to control your environment. I pulled inspiration from these genres the most, but also included some classics like Resident Evil to help us remain true to our theme.
To help the player to strategize on how to terrorize the campers, we needed a way to broadcast what part of the cabin they were going to be in. To communicate this, we decided that the campers would have different needs that they would need to fulfill and different rooms they could do that in (e.g. the kitchen relieves hunger, the bedroom relives sleepiness).
Presenting this info in a clear, intuitive way was critical, so I whipped up some initial prototypes to experiment with info density and layout. Meanwhile, I started brainstorming how players would scare the campers and execute deadly hauntings. Below are a couple of my initial explorations:
After a few revisions, the screens were still feeling too crowded. A breakthrough came when one of my team members suggested that we only show a camper's most pressing need and their fear level. Now only having to show two types of information, I began playing around with different metaphors on how to represent them.
It was also at this point that we opted for a camera zoom-based way of selecting items to haunt, so I no longer needed to figure out a menu for haunting objects or executing killer haunts.
Once I was satisfied with the layout of the screen, I began mocking things up in high fidelity using Aseprite. Most of the concept art was finished at that point so I used it as inspiration for the shades of red and character portraits.
As we got closer to launch and were able to play the game, a few of my team members felt the fear juice meter was a little large and distracting. I agreed, so its size was reduced and its color darkened to make it less overt, but still helpful.
This gave us our final iteration:
