Games Studio

What the engagement looked like.

Five years inside a studio building the UI layers of shipped titles — menus, HUD, overlays, pause states, the parts that have to read at sixty frames per second on the lowest-spec machine the game still supports. The discipline was formative: I learned to think about interfaces as a rendering budget first and a design decision second.

The problem on arrival.

Games UI operates under constraints that web UI rarely sees. The frame budget is fixed, the input device isn’t always a pointer, the target screen could be a 4K monitor or a TV at viewing distance, and the interface has to live inside an art direction that isn’t yours.

Every HUD decision is also a game-feel decision. An overlay that reads clearly but floats badly over the action breaks immersion more quietly than a broken feature.

How it came together.

3 phases, each one trying to prove a single thing before the next could start.

1. Year 1
   HUD fundamentals

   Learned the stack — engine UI layers, gamepad input mapping, localization constraints, scaling across resolutions.

2. Year 2–3
   Owned systems

   Took the HUD and menu systems across multiple shipped titles. Built reusable layout primitives that survived the jump from one project to the next.

3. Year 4–5
   Diegetic + art collaboration

   Worked directly with art leads on interfaces that belonged to the fiction, not laid on top of it. Pause states, inventory screens, ambient overlays.

What shipped.

UI across five-plus shipped titles — menus, HUD, overlays. Carried the discipline of tight budgets and gamepad-first design into everything built since: a 16ms frame budget in your twenties makes a 60ms interaction budget in your forties feel generous.