After the essential work for another project was completed, I was brought in to support the development of the game Neverdale Park, which had already been in development for one and a half years.

My role focused on improving the game’s UI and creating final layouts in Unity, which would work for all device ratios – and optimizing the use of assets. I supported our Game Designers with new features trough the development and wrote the game’s extensive background lore.

The result is a free to play match-3 game, that’s set in a colorful, humorous fantasy world in an enchanted forest.

I had my hands on pretty much every UI part of the game, so I’m presenting a small selection below.

One of my first suggestions for the game was to simplify the navigation flow. Until then, each screen had been handled as a separate entity, each section took the player to another place – so the game was full of transitions and loading times. Instead of loading a different scene in a traveler tent, we had the player’s view simply move a bit to the left, looking at his guidebook, including a nice parallax effect of the background landscape.

One of my first concepts for both the management and focus screen. The little jar in the bottom corner of the focus page was later replaced by a device which boosted and upgraded the creature.

And instead of fading to some place in the woods, I suggested to simply unfold a page of the creature guidebook, presenting the creature entering a page, similar to the moving pictures in Harry Potter.

On the focus screen, the player can feed & upgrade his creatures. It started fairly simple, but got more and more features, so that we decided for a solution with tabs, to provide information without overwhelming the player.

I liked the different creatures and their evolutions a lot and volunteered to write +75 creature backstory descriptions, which hint at their further evolution.

Popups inform the player about the creatures they are about to encounter. The newspaper „Neverdale Star“ is commenting on the player‘s progress and gives the game a humorous voice.

The project management suggested features like a team name generator, so i created a concept and a creation flow for a generator that would allow randomization and often hilarious name combinations. 50 text strings guarantee lots of funny name combinations, and it‘s fun to click through the random outcomes.

I suggested unique backgrounds which had to be unlocked by gameplay or In-app purchases.

During Let’s Plays on Youtube, players laughed out loud when they created their team logo, which made me very happy...

An early concept for the reward screen. The player receives loot crates which unlock after a certain amount of time.