UX LEAD at PHOENIX LABS (2024)
Some background: unfortunately in November 2023 I was told by my lead that Amazon Corporate was removing all remote roles, including mine, and allowing those employees to relocate to one of four Amazon “hub cities” on the West Coast to be in office 3x a week by the end of Summer 2024. I wasn’t able to do this and I started interviewing for a new position elsewhere. Phoenix Labs (the studio behind Dauntless and Fae Farm) hired me as their UX Lead in January 2024 for a new, unreleased title.
I worked as the UX Lead for a number of features for the game EverHaven (Codename Dragon), which was scheduled to launch in Early Access in Summer 2024. EverHaven is a voxel based open-world crafting and survival game (it’s a mix between Animal Crossing, Zelda, and Minecraft) made in Unreal Engine 5.
Unfortunately in May 2024 we were told that all employees associated with an unreleased project would be laid off. EverHaven was just 3 short weeks from being announced at Summer Games Fest and 10 weeks away from Early Access.
I’ve done my best to get some of the features I led on the team but not all of them will be able to be included here.
Key Art for the unreleased game EverHaven (created by another artist, not by me!)
SCREENSHOTS
Below are several screenshots of EverHaven built in Unreal 5. Every object in the game was able to be converted into a resource and used in crafting, building, and exploration. It was a massive floating island in the sky populated by voiced NPC’s, enemies, and creatures, and had multiplayer with up to 8 others. Players could interact with NPC’s, befriend them, build towns (or anything they wanted), capture and tame pets and mounts, and populate their town or home with NPC’s once they built up a relationship progression to the maximum level.
There was also a massive cave system and underground environments and Heroes to interact with.
FRONT END LOGIN
The goal for this design was to reduce friction for the players and to make the login and account linking as efficient as possible.
There are many more screens to this UX but the gist of this design was to have three possible states on login. Unregistered (no Phoenix Labs account and no platform ID - this player is likely offline), Registered (only tied to your current platform), and Authenticated (cloud saves enabled and your Phoenix Labs ID is tied to EverHaven on any platform you play it on).
I worked directly with the Lead Game Designer for this feature. I also worked directly with a small team of UI Engineers, gameplay engineers, a UI Artist, external contractors, and the producer of this team.
New Game state. This player has never played EverHaven/Dragon. New Game will create a new game world for them to play in.
This player has a new Continue button state (text is just placeholder) that will take them to their game list.
A returning player will see a list of their worlds (or their friends worlds) in the list on the left. The context for the selected world and the call to action is on the right.
Selecting one of the worlds from the list will also change the scene in the middle to showcase the player’s custom character as well as their mount (if they’ve unlocked it at this point). The placeholder hearts were also to indicate the NPC Heroes that they’ve met and befriended in that world.
CHARACTER CUSTOMIZATION
I designed the UX for the Character Customization. The goal for this feature is to have this UI accessible from the front end when the players were first starting a world as well as being available from their player UI at any time.
The design goal for this feature changed multiple times and shortly after this was designed it was redesigned from being accessible at all times to being only accessible on the first time login and then again at a wardrobe or mirror object interaction.
INVENTORY
This was an early first pass on updating the player’s inventory UX. The player has a limited amount of slots in their bag (30 total) but a consistent ask from playtesters and developers was a way to allow a quick way to swap between different “hotbar” slots. I created a new UX that moved one row from their bag to a new row in the hotbar UX. Using the D-Pad, players could quickly swap from a custom hotbar that could hold either all their weapons, food, or crafting items.
I also created two new slots that added armor for players. EverHaven didn’t have armor at this time and all customization was purely cosmetic. The design was to add new craftable and wearable rings and amulets that would increase the defense for players.
This UX allowed players to Split Stack their items if they wished.
MAP and NAVIGATION
A major feature I was tackling as UX Lead was the Map and Navigation for players.
I added a compass at the top center for frame of reference. Previously, there was no compass or directional navigation. I added a compass on the HUD and POI icons that would allow for directional context. Pinning a location on the map would also add a “pillar of light” that helped world navigation. Other players would have an assigned color to their pillar of light if they also added a pinned location.
QUESTS and MAP OVERVIEW
I tied the players Journal, which also contained NPC quests, to the map overview. Players could navigate the Hero list and associated quests as well as track the quests directly from this UI.
