Portal Knights

Product Positioning

Accessible fantasy action for the Minecraft crowd

Platforms

iOS, Android, PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch

Publisher / Developer

505 Games / Keen Games

My Contributions

I was responsible for the entirety of the player-facing UI. Starting from the pre-production, covering design, UI art, and all the way to the shipped code.

Working with internal and external stakeholders to define and plan aesthetic and functional goals for all menus and information displays.
Establishing the screen flow, the information architecture, and the look & feel.
Creating the visual design incl. layouts, typography, icons, and textures.
Front-end programming: ActionScript 3 (via Autodesk Scaleform) for the initial release. Rebuilt in C++ with Keen’s engine starting with the Nintendo Switch release.
Maintaining and expanding the live product over multiple years.
Regular iterations responding to player feedback.

General Strategies

The mobile-first approach uses generous element sizes to ensure comfortable touch interactions. It results in a friendly appearance, which fits the tone of the product and is useful on non-mobile platforms as well.
Careful information architecture and layouts aim to strike a balance between information density, readability at different screen sizes, and reasonable amount of navigational steps.
The UI code is largely platform agnostic and handles all input modalities concurrently, able to switch between touch input, keyboard & mouse, and controller on the fly.

Styling

Light skeuomorphic styling on the menu framing was used to evoke the cartoonic fantasy theme that feels grounded in the game world.
The content within the menu frames is “drawn on paper,” which is designed to provide flexible content containers while balancing theming and visual weight.

Head-Up Displays

Informative / supportive elements during in-world activities, aim to clutter the screen as little as possible while providing the necessary information.