Breaking Bad Mobile Game
Client: Mediatonic
2016-2017
What was initially only to be a month of paternity cover turned into an 8 month contract working on a mobile adaptation of one of the most exciting TV franchises of all time, Breaking Bad. Sadly, the game never received a release, but we helped a small team at Mediatonic create a huge raft of screens for this empire-building game, codenamed ‘Kingpin’ throughout the life of the project.
Main HUD
The earliest requirement from publisher Scopely was an overhaul to the existing HUD, which they felt wasn’t quite capturing the essence of the Breaking Bad TV show. Below you can see a variant of the UI before we drilled down to the HUD we settled on, borrowing the deep greens, vibrant yellows and grubby and dusty textures from the series.
Overlays & Nodes
Kingpin was shaping up to be a complex game, with a need for multiple overlays on multiple building types (which we called ‘nodes’). Below you can see a sampling of these different types of UI systems rendered in the UI style that we established.
Events
‘Kingpin’ players were to be presented with an Events feature, which would have functioned similarly to daily quests in other persistent RPGs, where rewards would be presented to the player based on how many points they scored in the Event, and also in which position or rank they achieved in the global leaderboard for that event. Below, you can see the screen flow for a Raid event on a Cartel Construction Racket node.
The Burner Phone
The infamous second cell-phone! This was a more unique and fun part of the ‘Kingpin’ briefs; the creation of a skeuomorphic flip phone from the early 2000s, the time period that Breaking Bad is set in. Below you can see various concepts of how this meta-menu may have worked, evoked by tapping in the bottom right corner of the main HUD/map screen.
Character Cards
In keeping with many of its peers within this type of mobile game genre, Kingpin was to launch with a range of character cards depicting familiar faces from the series, which could be offered in various rarities as rewards or purchasable as part of store or gacha pulls. Shown below (click on the images to zoom) are the final designs for the range of rarities, and earlier spreads with a bronze and silver variant and a gun-metal frame variant. The associated mini-avatars and their rarities are shown at the bottom.
PvP Battle Screens
Launching an attack on an enemy player’s compound would bring up the Battle Screen, where the player can choose a raid party from his crew of available characters. Shown below are the selection screen, a character tooltip overlay and a report detailing how the battle played out.
