Objective

At the start of October of 2021, I was welcomed onto the talented team of designers behind the startup of Ages of Cataria. This brought a level of excitement for me, as I got to challenge myself with a medium I was not entirely familiar with — video game design. Being the designing force behind a mobile app’s interface was an entirely different experience from building game interfaces essentially from the ground up. I had to think about what kind of system our user would play AoC on. How to display key information without distracting from gameplay. How to make brown an appealing color in our UI. There were lots of things to consider now, and these things weren’t the types of challenges I faced when making designs in the past.

My Role

I worked as the Lead User Experience EDesigner alongside the fabulous illustrators and innovative game designers to help visualize what a user would walk through when they played our game. As the UX Lead, I introduced style guides, created flow charts, pushed conversation towards interaction setups, and brought ideas to the table that increased our chances of standing out in a flourishing, post-pandemic industry.

The Experience

We went through lots of change from the moment I started working for Third Pie. Some of our team had experience with designing games in the past. But most of us didn’t. This was a great influence on our team culture, because there wasn’t always a pressure of being right, or knowing in depth about every single thing that went on during discussions. It also gave us a lot of freedom with our designs and direction of our game. I am pretty well known for spouting out random ideas (some as jokes, but some that have lead to big solutions) and I was ecstatic to be able to vocalize to my team concerns about even the littlest details, and my teammates would not only receive it well, but also get excited as to how the conversation around the game was changing.

This pushed my limits in a way where as a UI designer, I start to feel more comfortable with my design process, being flexible with change, and bringing interesting ideas to the table. One of the most exciting parts of my time there was when we set a goal to crowdfund $10,000 to release our game, and we managed to make 4x that amount!

Below I share some of my process through my UI design for Ages of Cataria.