Game UI/UX · 2023
Interfaces That Feel Alive
Designing in-game interfaces and HUD systems that guide players without pulling them out of the world. From a AAA title to indie games and concept work.
- Discipline
- Game UI / HUD
- Headline
- Marvel's Wolverine (Insomniac)
- Tools
- Figma, Adobe Animate
- Range
- AAA, indie, and concept
Marvel's Wolverine
Building UI for the highly anticipated Marvel's Wolverine
View on PlayStationAn Insomniac Games title, releasing September 15, and a childhood dream to work on. Most of the work is under NDA, but here is what I owned.
- Prototyped 3+ gameplay features in Figma, wrote comprehensive UX design documentation on Confluence, and built a scalable component library with 20+ elements.
- Translated Figma prototypes into working UI animations on Insomniac's game engine using Adobe Animate.
- Ran user testing sessions with 20+ gamers, improving player navigation efficiency by 15% through iterative UI improvements.
- Collaborated with cross-functional teams of 15+ developers and artists to integrate design into AAA game production workflows.
- Led a Figma training session for the whole team, cutting UI iteration costs by prototyping in Figma first before moving to Adobe Flash and engine programming.
Moksha
A solo 2D top-down RPG, and my USC design thesis
Play on itch.ioA pixel 2D top-down RPG set inside the mind of a soul at its lowest. You play as the self, venturing deep into your own mind to face guilt, misery, and everything in between, in search of eternal freedom. The themes draw from the Ashtavakra Gita. I designed and built it on my own as my BFA design thesis at USC. You can play it on itch.io.
Turtle Town
Game UI for a 2D base-building defense game, built with a 40+ student team
See it on Behance- Duration
- Jan 2022 - May 2022
- Role
- Technical UI Designer
- Tools
- Figma, Photoshop, Unity, Perforce, C#
- Team
- 40+ students
My Quest
Redesign and improve the pre-existing UI for Turtle Town, a 2D PC base-building defense game. The old interface was cluttered, and a lot of the tasks players needed to perform to really experience the game were hard to complete. My aim was to cut player confusion and frustration around those tasks, and make the interface feel far more elegant.
Playtesting
I ran three rounds of playtests and turned each round's friction into a concrete fix.
Playtest 1
Players couldn't tell where to place buildings, couldn't zoom the build view, and weren't sure of the click-to-walk controls. I added on-screen control hints and clear build spots that highlight a building icon on hover.
Playtest 2
Upgrading and repairing buildings was confusing, and a menu bug sent clicks to the wrong menus. I consolidated upgrade and repair info into one dedicated panel.
Playtest 3
Too many tasks at once left players unable to track what needed doing. I added a dedicated quest panel so every task lives in one place.
Screens & Explorations
Rocket Labs
A concept redesign of Rocket League's customize UI
See it on BehanceAbout Rocket League
Rocket League is Psyonix's high-octane mashup of arcade soccer and vehicular mayhem. It launched in 2015 and went free-to-play in 2020, which only grew its community.
Concept
A self-initiated concept to grow community interest in Rocket League through Rocket Labs, giving players full control over the design of their cars: custom-designing their own decals or editing the ones the game provides. Rocket Labs merges the Item Shop and the Garage with community features built in, plus pre-launch in-game events and a new character introduced alongside it to add a layer of personification.
Screens & Concepts
Next project
Every Step, Considered
The intersection of research, data, and design to drive measurable ROI.