A solo project exploring visual craft and roguelike UI design.
Since my early days in game design, I'd always wanted to make my own game. Only recently was that realistic as a solo effort, thanks to AI-assisted development tools I'd picked up through my work at Akamai. So I decided to try it. Partly as a hobby, partly to push those skills further, and partly to play with aesthetics in a way my day job doesn't usually allow.
The spark was those mobile ads. My kids and I kept getting the ones where the gameplay looks great, you're commanding a squad through gates, powering up, fighting through a horde, and then you download it and it's a predatory base builder that plays nothing like the ad. What if that game were real? What if you took the concept, built it honestly, and pushed it further with roguelike design to make it actually good?
That's this project. It's a mobile roguelike that plays the way those ads promise, with real depth underneath.
The gameplay is still in development, but the menus, systems, and interface design are live. Here's the UI:
Click through the prototype above to explore the UI.
The UX draws on common patterns from the survivors-style roguelike genre, but strips out the predatory monetization and replaces the lowest-common-denominator visual approach with something more intentional. The interface work focused on card collection systems, loadout management, and progression flows. Familiar structure from the genre, but designed with more care and craft than these games typically get.
The single word I had in mind as I designed the visual tone was "whiplash." Everything in the game lives in deliberate contradiction. Realistically proportioned and concepted soldiers and grotesque zombies, reduced to low poly models with single color faces. The tone is dark and adult, but bloodless. The gameplay has you moving through multiplication gates and firing electricity weapons with damage numbers flying out of zombie heads like a casino.
That tonal tension became the design brief for the entire interface. The art direction draws from vintage poster art and retro film title cards, with the whole interface feeling like it's being projected through an old, slightly beat-up film projector. The aesthetic is bold and graphic, but the color palette isn't what you'd expect. It's dark and bright at the same time. None of it should work together, and that tension is the whole point.