A Fashion Icon

Style Merge was a game in development that originally started as a match 3 game and towards the end of its life cycle, shifted into a merge game. Making this kind of change far into the development process required a lot of thoughtful adjustment and optimization but in the end, the team came together and produced a product we were very proud of.

Style Merge unfortunately never made it out of the development stage, but it was a very well executed product with a lot of upside that just didn’t fit into future plans.

There was always an intention to do a second pass on the UI direction in Style Merge. We wanted to explore UI visuals that embodied an aesthetic that felt as though it was designed from a certain style of fashion. We researched and presented multiple fashion studies that could work for new UI directions and ultimately landed on a lux, high fashion direction that would use minimal details and a similarly minimal color palette. We began testing this with some simple mockups and felt that we were starting to enter the right visual space before unfortunately stopping production on the game.

One extremely important part of my visual design process is creating prototypes that walk members of the team through UI and UX design decisions I’m considering. These prototypes get handed off to technical, VFX artists and engineers for polish and implementation. I begin making prototypes as soon as possible, even if that means using simple greyscale, geometric shapes to help solve a fundamental interaction or figure out the user experience for a core flow.

Here is a small sampling of some early development, WIP prototypes that were essential to figuring out the game design, UI/UX design and overall product design in Style Merge.

Test for the entire game core loop and user experience flow in the old, match 3 version of the game.

Early UX test with the new UI direction.

Quick test to explain how I pictured the game win moment in the match 3 version.

Early development test showing interaction and UX options in the PVP section of the game.

Credits

Game Directors
Kris Horowitz, David Trammell

Game Design
Kris Horowitz, Toby Sarnelle, Grant Reid

Engineering
Thomas Wolfe, Ethan Gottlieb, Gonzalo Martínez, Jeff Schoch, Mohammad Saad

Associate Art Director
Hao Fan

Senior Visual Designer
Austin Roesberg

Visual Design
Tati Moniz, Alicia Feng

Illustration
Alicia Feng, Hao Fan, 1518 Studios

VFX & Technical Art
Shirley Huang

Composer/Sound Design
Ross Wariner, Cody Uhler

QA
Desiree Aultman