During my senior year at Bradley University, I was selected to serve as the UX Lead for a capstone game project with a team of 30+ students. Alongside other discipline leads, I helped guide the project through the full development cycle over the course of one year in preparation for FUSE, the university’s annual end-of-year showcase. Following graduation, our team continued development to further polish the experience, add new features, and resolve outstanding issues with the goal of publishing the game on Steam.

The project was complex and often challenging, but each obstacle provided valuable lessons, especially in leadership, collaboration, and designing within real-world constraints.

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As UX Lead, I owned the direction and execution of the game’s user interface from concept to implementation. I provided UX leadership, balance collaboration with decisiveness, and ensure the UI remained usable and cohesive as the project evolved. I led a small cross-functional UI team consisting of an artist, an engineer, a designer, and myself, and was responsible for aligning design decisions with the team’s strengths, schedules, and interests.

I organized and facilitated regular meetings, set priorities, and ensured the UI stayed cohesive throughout development. I initiated UI concepts, designed and iterated on layouts, collaborated closely with artists and engineers for feedback, and ultimately implemented the interface in-engine.

Our capstone project brought together 30+ students across multiple disciplines to build a complete game within one year. With overlapping responsibilities, evolving features, and limited production experience, maintaining a consistent and usable UI was a significant challenge.

The interface needed to be designed, tested, and implemented in parallel with gameplay development, often without finalized requirements.

My goal was to establish a clear and adaptable UX direction for the game while supporting a fast-moving, collaborative development environment. I aimed to create a UI that was fun and visually engaging, while balancing visual interest with subtlety.

The interface needed to feel thoughtfully stylized to match the game’s world and tone, without distracting players or getting in the way of gameplay. Success meant delivering a cohesive UI that enhanced the player experience, minimized friction during development, and remained flexible throughout an ever-changing production cycle.

During development, the primary audience for the project was players attending FUSE, many of whom would experience the game for the first time in a short, high-traffic showcase environment. This meant the UI needed to be immediately understandable, visually engaging, and thoroughly explained to new players.

A secondary audience included the development team and faculty reviewers, who needed a UI system that was clear, scalable, and easy to iterate on as features evolved. Designing with both audiences in mind ensured the interface supported player immersion while remaining practical to implement within a fast-moving academic production cycle.

The design process for this project was built around one core principle: clear and consistent communication. Working on a 30+ person, multidisciplinary student team meant that alignment was just as important as execution. The process evolved continuously as development progressed, requiring flexibility, planning, and close collaboration across disciplines.

As UX Lead, I worked closely with artists, engineers, QA testers, game designers, and production to ensure UI development stayed aligned with gameplay goals and technical constraints. A key part of my role was facilitating conversations, clarifying expectations, and ensuring each team member understood both their individual responsibilities and how their work fit into the larger system.

I regularly led planning sessions to define UI needs, explore ideas, and break work into manageable tasks. From there, I designed the interfaces, collaborated with artists and engineers on implementation details, and handled UI integration directly in-engine. This included building layouts, animating elements, QA testing, and iterating on the interface to ensure it functioned as intended in live gameplay.

This collaborative, communication-first process allowed the UI to evolve alongside the game while maintaining consistency, usability, and production momentum.

Early design focused on rapid exploration and alignment. Before committing to high-fidelity UI, I worked through rough sketches, flow diagrams, and low-detail wireframes to explore layout, hierarchy, and interaction patterns. These early artifacts were used as conversation tools, helping the team quickly evaluate ideas and surface concerns before development began.

Given the size of the team and the evolving feature set, flexibility was critical. I treated early designs as disposable, iterating quickly based on feedback from designers, engineers, and gameplay leads. This approach allowed us to validate direction early, maintain momentum, and move into production with confidence once a solution felt right.

Development was full of unexpected changes and challenges, from shifting production goals to faculty feedback and evolving game mechanics. As UX Lead, it was my responsibility to keep the UI team on track and adapt our work to meet these changes without losing consistency or quality.

Whenever the project’s direction shifted, I reprioritized UI features, explored new layout solutions, and worked closely with my team to incorporate their ideas and feedback. This often involved redesigning key elements, such as the player health display or menu navigation, while ensuring the interface remained intuitive and aligned with our overall vision.

Using Jira, sprints, and stand-ups, I managed tasks, redistributed resources, and kept our team focused on achievable goals. This approach allowed the UI team to remain stable and productive even as other areas of the project required major restructuring. As a result, we avoided costly rework, maintained a cohesive interface, and were able to respond efficiently to feedback throughout development.

As UX Lead, my primary responsibility in-engine was to bring the UI designs created by my team to life. This involved taking assets and layouts from our artist and my concept designs, ensuring they functioned correctly, and assembling them into a polished, playable interface that matched our vision. Implementation required careful attention to detail, iteration, and close collaboration with engineers and QA to make sure every element worked seamlessly within the game.

One of the features I was most excited about was the main menu, a sliding animation that transitions underwater to reveal the menu beneath. Near the end of development, scope changes threatened to cut this idea. The assets and triggers had already been completed by our artist and engineer, but without someone to implement them, all that work would have gone unused.

I accepted the challenge and, in a single day, taught myself Unity Animator to bring the animation to life. I integrated the pre-made assets, polished movement triggers with our engineer, and ensured the animation fit seamlessly into the game. The result was a polished, dynamic main menu that became one of my favorite aspects of the game and saved valuable work from being discarded.

Implementation was a critical part of the project, allowing our designs to function as intended in a real gameplay environment. This responsibility reinforced the importance of attention to detail, iteration, and collaboration, ensuring that the UI not only looked good but also supported the player experience throughout development.

After a year of iteration, collaboration, and problem-solving, the final UI for the game was polished, cohesive, and engaging. Each team member contributed their own strengths, and together we brought to life the main menu, HUD, tutorial, and other core interfaces.

The final designs balanced creativity with usability, reflecting both the game’s tone and the player’s needs. Seeing these elements function seamlessly in-game was the culmination of months of work, and a testament to the team’s dedication and hard work.

Despite a challenging development process, our team gave everything to deliver the final build. At FUSE, the game was a huge success, receiving strong praise from players for its atmosphere, scares, and  2D/3D art. Our game had people laughing, screaming, and fully engaging with the experience.

Even after graduation, we continued development and released the game on Steam, where it received positive feedback from players. Seeing our UI, systems, and creative vision come to life and resonate with real players was incredibly rewarding and validated all the hard work of our team.