Production Terminal - One of the main gating mechanics in the game. Players feed resources into it to progress their technology. I had to account for variable resource demands and completion states per item.
Assembler - Takes in resources and constructs more complicated items. The upgraded version takes in 4 ingredients maxmium to account for more complex recipes in the late game. The coolant/overclocking system never made it into machines in this capacity.
Mining Drill - Extracts raw resources from ore veins. Often the very first machine a player places so it had to be obvious how to interact with it. One slot for fuel to input, one slot for shiny rocks to output. Nothing fancy.
Smelter - Smelts raw ore into ingots. Usually the second machine a player interacts with, and thus a touch more complex. Two inputs produce one output. Eventually it uses power instead of fuel, which was originally replaced with Coolant.
Thresher - Takes in plants and separates them into seeds and usable organic materials. Once again upping the complexity: two inputs and two outputs, necessitating filter inserter use for the outputs.
Planter - Uses seeds to grow additional plants. Probably the simplest and easiest to use production machine.
Mixer - Mixes together or separates complex materials into base components. Sadly did not make it into the game. The functionality was basically rolled into the Crusher. I also did concept art and prototype meshes for the Crusher machine itself.
Crusher - Takes in resources and crushes them down into simpler resources via recipes. This machine UI was a challenge because it's more complex than pretty much every other machine AND it was added quite late in the dev cycle.
Crank Generators - Produces energy. The first versions a player builds have to be hand-cranked every few minutes, but later versions can be automated, accounting for the layout adjustments seen above in mk1 and mk2.
Sand Pump - Extracts sand from the sand sea in the Desert Biome levels. This version shows much more info than we ended up with in the final version.
Freight Elevator: Transport - Allows players to travel from level to level instantly. This was a variation of the Teleported menu, but accounted for several other pieces of information, including other player locations and excavation progress.
Freight Elevator: Excavation - Tracks overall dig progress in the world and allows assignment of excavator bits. I'm still a little bothered that this screen shows digging going up while levels are listed in descending order on the teleport menu...XD
Freight Elevator: Storage and Port Management - Allows players to send resources to other levels. A daunting-looking screen, but ultimately serves as a storage contained accessible across all levels. The bottom displays where resources are being sent.
Monorail Depot - Allows players to rapidly transport materials via a mini train system. A challenging screen to design as it has basically 3 separate inventories along with progress displays for up to 12 other items. We ended up cutting renaming.
Monorail Depot: Requester - Allows players to filter out materials mid-line with the monorail system. Sadly did not get into the final game as we were only able to build the Monorail as a point-to-point system without additional input/output nodes.
Beacon Customization - Allows players to customize their placeable Beacons. Sadly did not get into the game and became fairly superfluous with some of the level structure and quest flow changes in the final version.
Techtonica - Machine UI Design
I was responsible for designing and implementing the visuals for all of the machine menus in Techtonica. I worked closely with our designers to determine how to display the unique requirements for each machine interaction. The designs had to be both easy for players to undestand and flexible from a design perspective as there were multiple tiers for each machine that altered the functionality in subtle ways. For example, an Assembler would have ot account for either 3 or 4 inputs depending on the selected recipe, and depending on the tier, a Mining Drill could run on either organic fuel or electricity.
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The designs presented here are variations on each machine menu, some of which show functionality that did not make it into the final product.