We’ve just received full access to in-development images of Star Wars Jedi Survivor’s Lightsaber customization menu. We will be taking a look at just how the workbench changed over the course of production plus getting insights from one of the developers that was integral to its creation.
Back in 2024, Jordan DeVries, UI/UX Director on the Star Wars Jedi team at Respawn Entertainment held a talk at GDC delving into how it was made. It also revealed the learnings that they and the team found when getting player feedback. All of this is extremely interesting and the talk was behind a paywall until now.
Jordan kicked off the presentation by revealing some interesting stats about the customization workbench. It took 62 developers over 26 months across 10 different iterations to land at the final, well-executed menu. There was 4 focused player research studies along with 6 additional overall game studies involved to also get it right. The end product ended up receiving universal praise. Let’s now take a look at some of the early iterations, cut ideas and more.
A Lightsaber-only Photo Mode?
Above is a concept for a Lightsaber photo mode. The development team new players like to show off their Lightsabers on social media following the launch of Jedi Fallen Order. Due this, they looked at making a dedicated Lightsaber showoff mode.
This was cut and how the options are presented in the workbench in-game removed the need for this. That said, having all of the options such as materials per part is a much requested addition. Hopefully this could be added in Star Wars Jedi 3.
Small Tweaks, Big Difference
In the screenshot above, we can see a vertical slider on the right-hand side for the wear condition option. This ended up being landscape in the final game.
Vent Per Stance
During development, the team had looked at offering players the ability to toggle the heavy vents to only unfold and ignite in one of the 5 specific fighting stances. Jordan says it was cut for being “just too immersion breaking”. You can see an image of how it looked in development below.
An interesting observation the team made was that in both pre and post launch, a large percentage of the player base often miss buttons that were placed on the edges of the screen. The lower down on the screen a UI element was, the more likely it would not be seen. Ultimately, the most important thing was the core customization of the lightsaber parts and with that being the focus, that additional things like the vent angle did not take away from the most important parts.
Iterations
Below, you’ll find the various stages the UI/UX design team went through with the workbench. There were 10 different iterations over the course of the project starting in mid 2020 and running up to the game’s launch in Spring 2023. Some iterations saw small changes but they led to make a fantastic final design. Everything was carefully crafted.
Concepts
Version 1, Mid 2020
Version 2, Late 2020
Version 3, Early 2022
Version 4
Version 5, Mid 2021
Version 6, Mid 2021
Version 7
Version 8, Late 2022
Version 9, Late 2022
Version 10, Late 2022
You can watch and listen to Jordan’s full “Customizing a Billion Lightsabers: ‘STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor’ Workbench UX” GDC talk here. We highly recommend it and you’ll get a full understanding behind each of these images.
In recent Jedi Survivor news, the game got an improvement to its graphics thanks to a recent firmware update put out by PlayStation. Learn more here.
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