In 2013 I joined Aquiris as Lead UI designer. My first assignment was to design the UIs of the free to play version of Ballistic. The game stayed online for 3 years running in browsers and registered 6 million players. For the new version the stakes were higher, but we all knew how big was the challenge to became competitive on the Steam Store.

In the pre-production phase we did intense heuristic analyses of Ballistic experience and analysed data we collected from 3 years of usage on different countries and cultures.

I started working on the wireframes using what we've learned to generate proposals and conducting rapid internal testing. As a result we designed a clean structure where players could access multiplayer matches in less than one minute.

The visuals should reinforce usability and accessibility. I moved alway from the dark cyberpunk theme introducing a clean high-tech style that preserved the link with the futuristic set of the game universe.

The HUD was designed to reinforce the frenetic gameplay, a strong characteristic of Ballistic. Small flat shapes and a lean color palette with a perspective movement were used to create the futuristic style. Also the feedbacks were reduced to a minimum keeping the player attention on the action.

It is quite expensive to maintain a free to play game considering server costs and constant content updates. It requires a big team and resources.

By shifting the business model to retail and improving the overall experience, Ballistic Overkill has become a success for the studio selling more than 100k copies until the last update of this website.

The creation of a consistent guideline was crucial to speed up the development of game with this scale. We documented interactive behaviours, shapes, typefaces and colors rules to guide UI programmers to implement it using Unity engine.

Check out the game on Steam: