Bullet Heaven / Dark Cosmos — Product Context
Bullet Heaven / Dark Cosmos — Product Context
Section titled “Bullet Heaven / Dark Cosmos — Product Context”Register
Section titled “Register”Product. This is in-game UI serving gameplay (HUD, docks, ability indicators), not a marketing surface. Design serves the moment-to-moment play experience; it never competes with it for attention.
Users & Purpose
Section titled “Users & Purpose”Players controlling a ship in a fast, dense bullet-heaven survival game, primarily via:
- A game controller on Apple TV (10-foot living-room viewing distance, Siri Remote as a fallback input)
- Touch on iPhone/iPad (portrait or landscape, one-handed or two-thumb play)
- Desktop keyboard/mouse (secondary platform, used for development and Mac play)
Players are mid-action, eyes on the swarm and their own ship, not reading UI. Any HUD element competes directly with survival-critical visual information (enemy positions, incoming attacks, their own HP). The job of the HUD is to answer “am I in danger” and “what can I do right now” at a glance, and otherwise get out of the way.
Brand Personality
Section titled “Brand Personality”Neon-void, arcade-precise, restrained. Confident use of a single strong accent (cyan) against near-black space, not a rainbow of competing colors. Deliberately closer to a clean flight-HUD or a chess-defense-style neon minimal interface than to a busy mobile-game dashboard.
Anti-References
Section titled “Anti-References”- Mobile free-to-play HUD clutter: currency counters, daily-reward badges, notification dots, XP bars competing with gameplay at all times.
- Generic “gamer” UI: excessive bevels, aggressive red/orange gradients, chunky slab-serif numerals.
- Anything that must be read carefully to understand — a HUD element should communicate through color/shape/motion, not require parsing text mid-fight.
Strategic Design Principles
Section titled “Strategic Design Principles”- One-stick accessibility first (a stated pillar of this game): the HUD must never require precise reading or fine motor input to parse.
- Show only what’s urgent, on demand for the rest. Default to minimal always-on info (health); let the player summon anything else (loadout, abilities) with a single input when they want it, rather than showing it constantly.
- Prefer diegetic feedback over abstract icons where the game world can carry the same information (e.g. a ship’s own thruster glow indicating ability readiness) — it reads faster and never competes for a separate patch of screen.
- Escalate visual weight with actual urgency, not by default. Calm and quiet when safe; louder and more prominent as danger increases (e.g. HP prominence scaling with damage taken).
- Accessibility: color is never the only signal (shape/size/motion always co-vary with meaning); legible at 10-foot TV viewing distance as the baseline case, since that’s the primary platform.