System and Player Experience
Besides developing game modes, I am also experienced in creating a variety of improvements around Goal Setting, Loading Screens, Car Acquisition Experience, Assists for in-race and general FTUE experience around feature unlocks. For all my designs, I always consider tool design and improvements as well, and have actively worked with developers to make sure the tool is live-ops friendly.
Goal Setting & Widget
Improved the goal setting experience by adding goal widget, and foreshadowing car goals.
Goal Setting (Left)
The main objective — acquiring the car on the plinth — was understood but not clearly enough. The challenge was resolving this without moving the car, which would have expanded scope significantly. The solution was a daily campaign intro that contextualised the current goal for players, paired with objectives listed against each goal car and appropriate deeplinking. Future cars were also foreshadowed, giving players a clear view of the content ahead and a reason to keep progressing.
Goal Widget (Right)
The design objective was to help players understand their goals at a glance. Early attempts involved writing goals out explicitly, but this created screen clutter. The solution was to represent goals through campaign, seasonal, and gacha imagery with appropriate deeplinking — a simpler, cleaner approach that communicated more with less. A progress bar was added where relevant to reinforce momentum.
Car Acquisition
Making sure cars are the hero and are being presented accordingly.
The design objective was straightforward — make receiving a car feel like a genuine moment of celebration, with the car as the hero. Research into character reveal and acquisition patterns across games pointed consistently in the same direction: showcase the subject at its best, strip back the UI, but make rarity unmistakable.
This informed the approach directly. Rarity was expressed through VFX rather than UI labels, keeping the screen clean while still communicating value. Information was kept to a minimum, ensuring nothing competed with the car itself during the moment of reveal.
Loading Screens, In-race assists, and Tutorials
Better tooling, smarter systems and guided tutorials.
These three areas are grouped together as they all sit within the broader category of player communication and information delivery.
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Loading Screens
Working closely with my dev, I helped build a system smart enough to detect which transition or screen a player was heading to, serving contextually relevant loading screens accordingly. This involved designing a priority system, defining multiple surfacing criteria, and building in flexibility around the images themselves — ensuring the system could scale and adapt without manual intervention each time.
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In-Race Assists & Feature Unlock Tutorials
The Feature Unlocks was a relatively easy challenge, as this mainly involved crafting tutorials around introducing new systems. Our in-house blueprinting tools allowed tutorials to be fully crafted by designers, which was a significant creative advantage.
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My contribution centred on extensive research — studying tutorials across games, running CI tests, and closely observing how players interpreted in-race mechanics. Getting it right proved to be one of my harder challenges; the first iterations missed the mark. After several rounds of refinement, the key insight was understanding precisely when to slow down time — giving players just enough space to register why they needed to act, rather than simply telling them to.