Internship
Get Your Tentacles of my Waifu
Position
UI Design
What I did
Collaborated with a solo indie developer in a mentorship-style internship to assist with in-game UI refinement and technical integration.
Utilizing Figma, I mapped out and designed fresh UI/UX concepts to modernize the game's interface layout. On the technical side, I developed a custom, code-based system in Unity to procedurally generate dynamic dot-and-line patterns directly onto the button interfaces, gaining valuable experience in runtime graphics generation.
Throughout the internship, I worked closely with the lead programmer, gaining direct insights into professional code architectures and production workflows.
UI/UX Design
Core Layout & Statistical UX Engineering
-
Intuitive Equipment Layouts: Designed a modular Figma concept for the inventory screen, utilizing a centralized character silhouette hub flanked by specialized panels for stat matrices, currency tracking and reactive info windows.
-
Mission Reward Visualization: Concepted a clean Level info overlay that leverages clean iconography to display unlockable content and completion rewards, improving immediate player feedback before initiating a stage.
-
Dynamic HUD Component Clustering: Formulated a compact player-vitality HUD concept, utilizing organic circular borders and angular progress bars to seamlessly cluster HP, resources and core mechanics around the player icon.
Visual Metaphors & Emotional Narrative UI
-
Contextual Dialogue States: Iterated on dynamic dialogue box variants to enhance narrative delivery, implementing a jagged, custom silhouette layout to visually telegraph shouting or intense audio cues.
-
Thematic UI Exploration: Experimented with diegetic interface designs, including wing-flanked text boxes and tentacle selection highlights, to reinforce the game's creature-centric world and flying mechanics.
-
Information-Rich Menus: Structured the main menu concept with boxes that present secondary descriptive windows upon selecting individual buttons to guide navigation.
Technical Constraints & Iterative Alignment
-
Sprite-Sheet Adaption Learning: Used early pause menu concepts to explore stylized, high-fidelity themes, learning to iteratively balance creative ideas with technical constraints to align designs with the developer's sprite-sheet framework.
-
Visual Interface Iteration: Translated early functional graybox layouts into polished, visually cohesive interface concepts within Figma, establishing clear layout spacing and structuring the presentation of information.
Programming
Low-Level Procedural UI & Mesh Generation
-
Custom Mesh Population: Scripted custom geometric generation logic by overriding Unity's "OnPopulateMesh" pipeline, utilizing the "VertexHelper" API to programmatically clear, manipulate and pass custom "UIVertex" structures down to the GPU.
-
Vector-Based Layout Math: Engineered a collision-free placement algorithm to populate unique button patterns with non-overlapping, multi-sized procedural circles while handling complex edge-clipping constraints along bounding boxes.
-
Dynamic Line-To-Circle Anchoring: Applied trigonometry and vector math to calculate the closest surface boundaries between adjacent circles, ensuring dynamic UI lines snapped perfectly to outer circumference vectors.
-
Alpha Overlap & Blending Fixes: Debugged rendering anomalies related to additive alpha stacking on intersecting vector lines, restructuring vertex color allignments to enforce stable transparency values across complex, nested layouts.