Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers was my first foray into FPS shooters, and it was a humbling experience. I didn't realize how much I didn't know until I was in the thick of it. The franchise, believe it or not, doesn't offer much in the way of art direction — there's surprisingly little visual reference from the films to draw on when building game UI. That made every design decision harder.

Offworld had built Squad, an incredible game — but Squad was never known for its UI/UX. So one of my core goals from day one was to convince the producers and game designers of the real value of UX design. Whatever else happened, that had to land.

My approach was to let the game's training assets and character models take center stage, keeping the UI functional and supportive rather than competing for attention. The game had strong roots, but it had a lot of functional issues that needed to be cleaned up — and that's where I spent the majority of my time.

My role grew well beyond UI/UX into experience design: setting up navigation systems, mission awareness, and system-level design. I also contributed to art direction — giving critiques on how to make interactable objects in the world actually read as interactable, making gameplay structures more experience-friendly.

One of the highlights was that gameplay evaluations became extremely valuable on this project. They gave the game designers and me a shared lens to look through — and that collaboration made everything better.