Cricket 26

Novmber 2025

My Role

Cricket 26 was the 3rd game I was one of the Lead Programmer on, I oversaw all of the frontend except ProTeam (Our other Programming Lead is souly resposible for proteam since it is basically another whole game), I delegated tickets and tiarged issues that came up and over saw compliance for Microsoft, Sony. I had 2 juniors and a mid level UI programmer to help me undertake this massive task in the tight development window we had.

Main Menu

With any game the centre piece (apart from gameplay) is the main menu. We aimed to deliver a nice colourful experience, so each tile has a colour attached to it and it will update the background and and logo at the top left. (Here is a Menu Walkthrough)

Here the buttons are made dynamically from a config so we could easily separate them out into the 5 tabs.

The large banner is being driven by the server, so when the user logs in we get a set of images and display then in a carousel

Issues we ran into early with this menu was the submenus that opened we also populated save data directly into it to allow the user to have a quick time getting back to what they were doing on a reboot. We ran into a case where we were modifying a global variables of the submenu data for the buttons and it kept adding save data each time you would re-enter which resulted in the fun case where the list would go off the screen, nothing a clone of the table before modifying it couldn't solve.

World UI

For Cricket we wanted a nice dynamic way we could put data on the big screens around the stadiums. S0 I paired up with a technical artist and we formulated a plan on how we would achive it.

To the right you can see large image that we would use as an atlas so the artist could take snipits from it to show relevantdata no matter what size the screen would be.

This piece took 2 full redesigns due to the amount of data would occasionally be clipping into the other regions.

If I were to do this again I wouldn't make it layout based I would set the X/Y of each element so changing the font size wouldn't force everything to be shifted around

HUD

Batting Controls

When it comes to batting controls we needed a good way to indicate what each of the face buttons did and what options you currently have toggleable

Field Radar

During the cricket development we wanted to completely overhule all in game HUD element, and the first thing I looked at was the radar

Blue is the current bowl carrier
Green are the batters that are behind the crease.
Red is when the batters are out of the crease
Orange is the bowl
White are the fielders

Each of these positions elements can be modified by the users via the accessbility settings

Bowling Huds

Stanard

Pro

Aracde

Cricket 26 I also redid the entire bowling hud. which was a massive task since we have 3 control schemes Arcade, Standard (C19) and Pro Controls

Where each varrient had drastic differences in how they functioned, it was a massive overtaking, when the main goal for the overhaul was a visual refresh to make it easier to change for the future projects and keeping the essance so returning players could easily jump in and know what is going on.

This is not the extent of the work I did on the HUD other elements I made were;

Main Score Hud code wise was not really touched but I had a had in helping out UI Tech Artist overhaul the visuals and implementing the theming based on the different competitions
Match Intro TeamA vs TeamB
Pre match Line up
Pitch Condition
Decision Review System (DRS) Tells if the player was out or not out
Screen Wipes got a massive overhaul and new events were added (Events, Four, Six, Wicket, Duck, GOLDERN DUCK) (Will profive gif for duck because I love it)
Coin Toss UI

Career Modes

Management Career

For the management career mode we had quite a bit of data to display depending on the different states you could be in,

On the left the 'Select Lineup' is what we would refer to as the adavance tile, it will progress time and let you interact with events (e.g Player Injury/Suspensions, Playing a Match, Contract offers from other clubs and so many MORE!!!). When simulating time the bottom right tile will update as some visual feedback to the player that the game isn't frozen or uninteractable

Then the centre top is the Competition Tile, which will show the current competition you are interacting with and where you are on the ladder interacting with it will take you to a competition hub where you can view all other competitions you are not in and see the match reports and statistics for each of the competitions.

The Centre bottom tile is the Objectives tile it will cycle through your current objectings that you have active.

Top left is the Inbox/News It will animate between the top 5 items in the two "inboxes" Here you can view match reports and results of other competitions

There are few other tabs that have training where you can choose a training plan and assign players to give them a boost in each match

Player Career

Within the player career mode there are a lot of similar items as amanagement career but we are introduced to cutscenes, This was the first time I had to deal with cutscenes that could change angles and in some cases we had to move the UI to the Left hand side if the player was being framed on the right. (Image 1 & 2 in the carousel)

Challenges when it came to this was the mock-ups never really took into account cutscenes they assumed we were always going to be on a main background (below I will give a clearer example of the background) and a lot of the screens has transparent backings and we needed to add a fade for readability (Image 3 in the carousel fade is hard to see against the black lockers but on the bench you can see it)

Here we can see what a more filled out Inbox looks like there is a style for it when the messages are marked as read

Pro Team

Pro team is our indevour into a microtransation mode with cards, My only conributions to this area of the game was the cards

The cards were achieved by layering 4 images ontop of each other

Background
Player
Frame
Data Images (+Text)

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