Starship Troopers

On Starship Troopers, the challenge wasn't a lack of capability—it was the opposite. The team already had strong developers and solid UI foundations in place, but the system had grown overly complex. There was simply too much.

My role became one of refinement: trimming, consolidating, and making the experience more efficient without discarding the good work that was already there. That required a high level of respect for what the team had built, while still creating space to evaluate it critically.

I helped the team benchmark their work against industry standards, using clear visual comparisons and diagrams to make those gaps tangible. From there, I led structured playtesting sessions to ground decisions in real user behavior, not assumptions.

A big part of the process was building empathy for the player—shifting perspective from "what we built" to "how it's actually experienced."

In practice, this meant:

• •Running playtests and synthesizing findings
• •Redlining existing UI to identify opportunities for simplification
• •Breaking down where the experience currently stood versus where it needed to go

That combination made it possible to align the team around a shared direction and move forward with clarity, not guesswork.