Noreen Rana - Watchdogs Legion

Art Lead
Noreen Rana

Art Direction
Daniel Molina
Yves Lançon

Graphic Design
Nicolas Lajuenesse

Motion Design
Daniel Molina
Nicolas Lajeunesse

UI Artists
Daniel Molina
Louise Duncan
Chris Francis
Shane Saxton

Co-Dev Team
Yvan Isnard
Mauricio Guimaraes
Laurent Gaumer
Florian Ungureanu
Alexandru Stefan
Victoriia Tretiakova

For Ubisoft's third installment of the Watch Dogs franchise, I managed the Toronto UI Art team, along with supporting the co-dev art teams in Montreal, Bucharest and Kiev.

Before taking on the leadership role full-time, I lead the early stage integration of our UI designs to establish the game's functional UI, using Flash and Ubisoft's Dunia engine for implementation. This involved building menus, HUD elements, animations, managing icon libraries and establishing the best practices and guidelines to be followed by the rest of the art team, in collaboration with our UI programmers and designers.

This project was by far one of the biggest challenges of my career, due to the ambitious nature of the game, along with managing a tough cycle of iterations and changes.

As lead, I established a standard of best practices for our UI Artists, worked with technical UI artists to refine and update our UI integration tools, supported, mentored and trained our growing team of artists and ensured we kept a close circle of support during our challenge production. I worked with our UX directors, programmers and designers to validate and manage the UI art workload along with problem solving the challenges that come with delivering a high quality UI with tight deadlines and a complex UX.

This role was more than just managing an art team, it was establishing a culture of support and positivity, to ensure our team felt empowered and proud of the work they were delivering.

Main Menu

Main menu and accessibility features were developed by our Kiev UI team.

In Game Menu

Much of our in game menus were design and integrated by our Montreal team, with UX designs lead by Yvan Isnard. I lead the early stage art integration in collaboration with our Toronto UI programmers to establish the infrastructure of our menu system.

HUD

Our HUD and motion design were spearheaded by our principal artist, Daniel Molina with our branding, cinematic and loading screen assets created by graphic and motion designer, Nicolas Lajeunesse.

Iconography, HUD, Menu and other in game integrations were done by Louise Duncan, Chris Francis and Shane Saxton.

I managed the UI art pipeline for our extensive library of rendered assets and iconography that are seen extensively throughout the world, from the weapon wheel, operative loadout, profiler and world map.

Localization Support

I worked closely with our Localization teams to manage the integration of our fonts and multiple character sets of our different languages. For a game that depended on displaying so much information, we worked with our designers and LOC teams to establish guidelines for character counts and rules to respect player comprehension in every language.

We are really proud of the effort put into fully supporting Arabic localization in Watch Dogs: Legion. This was done through the support of our teams in Kiev to fully adapt our UI to accommodate for Right-to-Left reading.