Game
Garden Getaway
One year, one game, and a lot of merging.
The goal was simple(ish): make and launch a new game in just one year. We mixed merge mechanics with island decorating, aimed at women 30+ and, conveniently, I was the target audience. So yes, I was designing for myself. Research made easy!
As the only UI/UX person on a small dev team, I wore a few hats: setting the visual style, creating assets, designing the UI, and getting everything into Unity. Along the way, I also fell down the AI rabbit hole, using it to generate visuals and help write Unity components.
It was a lot of fun. And I learned a ridiculous amount along the way.
Finding the visual sweet spot
We didn’t want to reinvent the genre. Since the game was aimed at a broad audience, staying close to the visual language of industry leaders felt like the right choice.
From there, we looked for our own flavour: cozy, homey and inviting, with bright colours and clean pages. Not too sleek, not too retro, more like a place you’d actually want to spend time in.
There was one more practical constraint: the style had to play nicely with AI generation. So we chose a visual direction that was distinctive enough to feel like ours, but consistent and simple enough to produce reliably at scale.
Here’s a moodboard I got inspired by.
Merge Game
Narrative
Garden
Splash and sales
