My first creative passion was designing and editing music videos. It was explorative, challenging, and involved a lot of charity shopping for costumes, but who knew that it would lead me into building a multiplayer detective games with international appeal?
After studying Multimedia and Videography at college, my love for animation slowly overtook my love for video editing as I realised I didn’t need to source locations, rely on friends to act, or spend my small savings on costumes, I could just draw everything! This then burgeoned into an 11 year career at a university because my college teacher thought I was “pretty good” at what I did and he knew of a job going there as a Multimedia Developer.
After a few years honing my animation and Illustrator skills, I noticed another shift… I was increasingly drawn to UI design for small-scale interactive resources.
“Why does it have to be boring and standardised just because it’s educational?”
I thought to myself.
Luck prevailed and I was able to recommend my friend for the new developer role in my team that meant he could pursue his dream career, and together, we started challenging the status quo of what interactive educational resources looked like.
Little by little I would challenge myself by always keeping an eye out for what others were doing that I thought worked and liked, and tried also to learn from their mistakes. Pinterest and Dribbble were my greatest inspirations for interface designs, and they still are!
Slowly the word spread around the university and our projects started increasing in volume and complexity until the first proper ‘game’ I ever designed landed on our desk. It was an ode to Scotland Yard, the board game. Where you play as police officers and need to try and catch a criminal who only periodically reveals themselves throughout the game. You have limited resources and need to collaborate with your team via the custom-built chat function, to make decisions about your next move.
The biggest USP? Every action was recorded and fed back to the academic who could then evaluate those ever elusive ‘soft skills’ that are hard to quantify. Thus providing an integral insight into his international student cohort who he was never going to meet in-person. It was even a big enough success that a sister university in Hong Kong wanted to begin using it in their courses!
The game was a steep learning curve for myself and my friend and as it took far longer than we initially thought it would, I got quite good at figuring out time-saving solutions to implement without detracting from the User Experience. Once such solution was restricting the experience to a single orientation on mobiles for initial release.
Creating and managing positive relationships with the people we needed to work with (like IT, cybersecurity, and upper management) was also actually a great time-saving technique. This meant each new resource was faster to implement and they could see the positive impact of our resources and that we could lean on the asset and tech libraries we’d built for faster development each time.
We learned so much and my appreciation of my friend’s insane skill-levels at just 22 increased ten-fold by the end of it.
What I learned
- Custom chat features are complex—don’t add them unless they truly serve the experience.
- Designing mobile-first helps trim non-essential features and maintain focus.
- Locking screen orientation (for faster delivery) didn’t cause any user complaints.
- Setting up institutional databases requires diplomacy—and clear communication.
- Proof of impact builds trust, and opens doors for future innovation.
I will never stop learning as I continue to design games that challenge not only myself, but the players who engage with them. But I’ll never forget just how intense a custom chat function is—and I definitely steer clients away from building one unless it’s truly essential.
What’s one thing you’ve learned from something that you designed for the first time?
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