CHRISTIAN STRATTON

Challenges: Spore was a great experiment in procedural game design. The entire content system was scripted. My challenge was to create a library of planets that filled a galaxy and took roughly 1 Mb of disk space. This included weather, flora, and features we called “prosthetic terrain pieces” that together built up an outlandish array of planets (and suns and moons!) Along with the Creative Director, Ocean Quigley, I developed a script-based system for painting height fields, coloring terrain with shaders and populating those terrains with “prosthetic” terrain pieces that integrated into the height maps of the plants. The data pipeline had to be carefully designed to accomodate the quantity of scripts. Ultimately, I trained a team of scripters (part artist-part technician) to aide in building out the game content.

CHRISTIAN STRATTON

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Roles: Planet Designer (Lead Technical Artist) Trained and led team of scripters (tech artists) to build out all planets, atmospheres and flora for the game.

Challenges: Develop the SimCity “reboot” game on a new agent-based simulation engine. Reimagine the features that made previous SimCity games great while making the result beautiful, easy to play and fun for casual players who might otherwise be turned off by the geekiness of a hardcore simulation game. The SimCity franchise had not been updated in 8 years. We recognized that the market was changing and wanted to build a new game that targeted a more casual player.

Role: UX Director Designed layouts, Data Layers, Multi-modal help and feedback systems, UI flow. Lead XFn team of UI Artists and Engineers

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Role: UI Director Designed UI, Hired UI team, trained them on flash UI development Shipped game. All in 6 months!

Penciler

Challenges: Modeler is truly an amazing tool. It’s a power tool for the most data savvy urban planners. And yet it has the potential to bring planners, city councils and citizens together to collaborate and share ideas. The project started out with custom datasets per locale - each had its own maintenance costs that didn’t scale well. I helped UrbanSim re think their data set design and architecture so that clients could subscribe to patches of a continuous national or even global data set. This opens up the tool to national contract entities that service multiple regions and facilitates tying the data into commercial and consumer services.

Modeler

Urban Sim Design Sketches

Rolls: User Experience and Interface Design Long-term design strategy Design Advisor www.urbansim.com www.penciler.org

Challenges: In response to the needs of developers, bring together a collection of time consuming research tasks into one streamlined web app. - Find suitable development sites - Estimate costs and revenue - Building envelope visualizer

The front of the salon is where the energy is - walls here are stark white and the lights are a brilliant daylight color The back is where clients relax - walls are darker and warmer. lights also shift to a warmer hue. Light cones around the skylights - emphasize the natural light

Challenges: Petaluma’s historic district has a large concentration of victorian commercial buildings. The common design themes are farm kitch, victorian antiques and 50’s neon as depicted in the movie “American Graffiti” I wanted to create a contrast to that. The clean lines and angles and attention to light break from the local traditions while also remaining warm and inviting.

Rolls Interior Designer Finish Carpenter Construction Lead Brand and Collateral Design www.ayasalon.comSalon of the Year, 2016

In 2014, I designed the interior for AYA Salon in Petaluma.I worked closely with architect, David Burton to transform an oddly shaped historic industrial building into a cutting edge salon with a focus on high-end retail and service.

in 2016, AYA Salon was one of 20 new salons around the world to be honored as a "Salon of Distinction" by Salon Today magazine for its interior design Judges’ comments:“I love how fresh this salon space feels. It’s modern and clean with well-planned custom spaces.” —Gallagher “A cozy area that allows guests to relax before their spa appointments—warm and calming.” —Leger

The results are beautiful

Context: The first Sims game was like a simple dollhouse. The sims that inhabited the houses were basic automatons that had a simple set of needs (Hunger, Engery, Fun, etc…) that drove their interactions with other sims or with objects (such as the pizza machine, bed or toilet). Despite these seeming shortcomings, the game was a huge surprise hit that tapped a new demographic of gamers and genre of game. Sims2 needed to expand on this success and pave the way to the future… On sites like Reddit, Sims2 still comes out as the fan favorite of the franchise.

UI: In addition to designing the gameplay mechanics, I designed the UI system and art directed an enormous library of iconography.

Role: UX Director Led team of UI Artists and Icon Designer Designed layout and Aesthetic of UI as well as... Gameplay mechanics (Wants & Fears and Ambitions)

Challenges: Game engineers greatly improved the sims - they could route narrow hallways better, they had dexterity, they finally had facial expressions… and yet there was no mechanism in place to control those expressions. I was tasked with creating a system that would allow users to “re-enact Shakespear plays.” Specifically, this meant giving the sims some “free will” to love one sim or hate another, to desire specific outcomes and to come up with a way for the user to pull the strings as they carry out their fantasies. Outcomes: I developed the concepts of “Wants” and “Fears” as well as “Ambitions” These let the user directly or indirectly affect the sims in their world. It allowed them to set up social dramas that were previously impossible. And ultimately, cemented the franchise’s success for the next decade.

Role: Art Director Led team of CG Artists Developed aesthetic, Made cut videos for game transitions, Concept art for marketing and for communicating to team.

Thanks for sticking with me this far! I’m an avid experimenter, builder, hobbiest. I belive that to be a good designer, one must learn how the physical world works. Yes, there are digital conventions that all good designers must master. However, these were distilled down not very long ago from designers that first mastered the phycal world around them before solving the design problems of the digital world. As we move into VR, MR, AR and even AI, we designers need to remember that all of this is rooted in the physical experience. that is where the customer is (at least for now!) My earlist UX design was in figuring out the best places to put kill switches on industrial saws. Or where to put trigger grips that force operators to keep their hands away from dangerous presses. Cheers! Christian

“Christian Stratton has a proven track record of transforming complicated concepts and mechanisms into fun, easy to understand experiences. His design contributions impact core product and often transform rough or risky ideas into high-value experiences.“ Stratton honed his design skills at Maxis/Electronic Arts. He was selected by industry leader, Lucy Bradshaw, to help develop some of the Game Industry’s most successful franchises. He has worked closely with luminaries in the industry - Will Wright, Ocean Quigley, Bing Gordon, Andrew Willmott and many more. Under Bradshaw’s leadership, Stratton worked in a small group of trailblazers that developed rapid prototyping methods to solve complicated gameplay problems. In his tenure at Electronic Arts, Stratton made “Data Layers” a fun, core feature of the SimCity franchise, designed the “Wants & Fears” and “Ambitions” that continue to define The Sims franchise to this day and he raised the bar for UX excellence across the Maxis studio. Several of the games he contributed to won the highly coveted 90 Metacritic rating and most were major successes for Electronic Arts.After a long run of successes in the Games Industry, Stratton yearned to apply his design skills to solve “Real World” problems. In 2014, he took an opportunity to design a cutting edge retail & hospitality interior for AYA Salon. The results won a coveted “Salon of the Year” award for the brand.In the years since, Stratton has carved out a niche as a design consultant for several innovative Bay Area startups. Like with game design, startups are under a lot of pressure to get their product designs right up-front before they go to market. In 2019, He helped Bluescape shape its new design team and establish design goals for interactivity and feature expansion. In 2020, he advised Modumate in San Francisco on their innovative approach to architect tools. Christian Stratton currently sits on the advisory board of Urban Sim in Berkeley.

Interactive Models: I developed a series of interactive mockups to pitch behavioral models to engineers and executives. These were quite successful in building trust within the company. Parallel to this, client companies were showing frustration at Bluescape’s development speed. I repurposed some of my mockups into presentation videos that were presented at the Adobe Max conference. (Tap the thumbnails below)

Marketing Materials: Below are a series of sketches used to guid the marketing team on ways to present the software to clients.

Background: Bluescape makes a software/hardware solution for teams to work on large visual datasets concurrently. Their solutions are uniquely theirs. The closest comparisons might be if zoom/lucid chart/miro were integrated onto a large room-sized computer touch wall. They found a successful niche with the CIA, MGM studios and Adobe. Their solutions enable teams to work with large interactive touch wall installations across different corporate locations. Challenges: The company was built up entierly of engineers. As a consultant, I was charged with exploring how Bluescape could branch out to other markets and platforms. The iPad is a perfect platform for the Bluescape concept. However, their interaction models were developed in isolation of larger market trends. I helped build up a design team and set the course for those designers to stear the company towards modern conventions for touch interaction.

Product Design: Below are additional sketches to explore how hardware form factors could affect the overal interaction experience

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