UI Development - Minimap Construction

Minimaps are definitely a strong staple of gaming today, particularly in the RPG genre, the need to plan where you are going next, or how to navigate through large land masses is definitely needed. As such i needed to design a minimap for the game.

To start i had to come up with general shape concepts, my group leader wanted the more traditional circular designs, which unfortunately didn't work due to how we were producing our own minimap (this being to add another aerial camera...which was square shaped) to add a satisfactory border to cover up the shape of the camera would require so thick a frame that it would have been intrusive to the game itself, so i had to persuade the group to a square frame and then work from there.

Initially my idea's were kind of bare bones, typically games used thin borders and some nice shading to give a frame to the mini map but ultimately there wasn't a lot there. so i worked from adding some more nature orientated frames to the UI, throwing in some self made compasses and time of day indicators for some added detail.

Later on in development we started shifting design more to being a depiction of a tabletop game as reality, so the idea between me and James (our lead designer) was to make the minimap appear as if it was an aerial view of a tabletop surface, this idea gave me some real nice ideas for framing, additionally from some research, many of these dedicated tabletop tables had things like cupholders, so i worked the compass to look like it was fit into these cupholders.

since this had to look like wood, i opted for light brown and cream tones to not be too similar to some of the more important elements of the UI, the minimap had to be noticeable but discrete. and in our case the design was in reference to our games themes (in the end our map even had the border look like a tabletop).
I did have to make a slight edit during testing as we found the border was too robust, so i gave that the border thinner but left the positioning of the other elements the same, giving them an appealing overlap.

All in all the minimap was probably one of the harder elements to design, research and reference not giving too much variation or interesting design to spurr off, it seems to be a minor enough element to some games that it got minor treatment, which was not great to base my designs from. but in the end talking with the team and focusing on our game themes enabled me to make a nice design.