Axis and Allies

I was hired as the UI/UX designer on Axis & Allies, and almost immediately the product owner decided to move on to other projects. I put my name in the hat and offered to take over product direction while continuing to handle UI/UX — and they said yes.

It was the first time in my life I'd taken on that much responsibility. I was managing the progress of all the developers, game designers, and artists on the project — and reporting that progress to stakeholders — while staying hands-on with the design work. It was really about aligning the entire team to common goals. The project was roughly two years behind on budget, and Beamdog had refused to give up on it.

The core challenge was this: how do you take a 50-year-old board game with 50-year-old rules and put it into a modern digital context? The answer is — you don't modernize it. You remain faithful to what the original game was about, because the audience is the original game player. We discovered the game was so antiquated that it had no appeal to a younger audience, so we had to work extremely hard to make it accessible to players who were used to board games. That meant a lot of player testing, community management, and interviewing users to gather their opinions — then filtering out what was valid feedback from what wasn't.

I had to train some of the designers and give them UI/UX skills. I created a pipeline between the designers and developers so everybody was on the same page — developers clearly understood their tasks, and I created briefs for the stakeholders to understand progress, which had always been a major issue.

The game engine was, believe it or not, a 2D JavaScript engine that was extremely difficult to work with. Many compromises had to be put in place to make this work — but we made it work.