March 2024 – July 2024
How do we develop a fresh identity and experience for gamers in a web-3 space?
Conducted UX Research and designed User Interface for the web-3 gaming platform along with an intuitive brand identity.
Impact
Aptos grant
The branding and pitch we designed for Spawn Point helped the company secure it.
Google Cloud
Architecture support, secured with the same pitch.
ICC Camp S1
Accelerated, with demo days at Google Cloud Singapore and the Hong Kong Web3 Festival 2024.
27 partner games
Signed as Spawn Point exclusives: every game in the prototype.
Short on time? See just the work
Spawn Point is a Web-3 based gaming platform which tends to elevate the experience of gamers by rethinking how they access games, own assets, and connect with each other.
20 weeks, March to July 2024.
Chapter 01
From a first conversation with the CEO to a list of features worth designing.
01
What exactly are we making here? I started by defining the product and understanding the context around the possible opportunity statement.
An interview with the CEO and a few other stakeholders gave me the CEO's initial hypothesis for the vision and mission statements, brand personality, and the platform's key USPs.
Click a card to read it
02
Do people really want it? I conducted a value proposition exercise with the primary audience (end users/gamers/devs) through an online interview session, which helped me validate the CEO's hypothesis and introduce a few necessary revisions.
03
Who are the people we are designing for? My secondary research involved going through relevant articles, research papers and community posts to further define the target audience.
Who they are
What they want
How to win them
Who they are
What they want
How to win them
After gaining a clear understanding of my users' relevant psychographics and demographics, I prepared the following personas to summarise my user research.
Click a persona to read it
04
What are others in this field doing? As part of the market study, my team performed a brief competition analysis and trend research to get a clearer view of which features we could take advantage of, what to avoid, and which game genres are appealing to the audience.
They looked at the layout, visual design, UX and key features of each platform, and scored the two giants, Epic Games and Steam, on the System Usability Scale, with SUS surveys sent to their regular players.
Global Games Market Forecast
Forecast Toward 2030
+44.9%
Total Market CAGR
2024 - 2030
What Is the Future Outlook for the Global Games Market?
The games market will continue to grow in the following years, exceeding USD 5.5 Bn at the end of 2030. By then, we forecast the games market to grow with a +44.9% CAGR to USD 5.5 Bn
Source: MarketsandMarkets, Web 3.0 market report
05
Are we all on the same page? At the end of the research phase, we conducted a focus group discussion with all stakeholders to review and align on the insights gathered.
06
What were our conclusions? After the FGD we drew the final insights from all our research and analysis.
"What people say, think, do and feel are always different, especially in a community as diverse as gamers."
Rent high-quality games with time-based options and online save features.
A clear and intuitive platform for a smooth gaming experience.
Connect, interact, and foster a sense of belonging through robust community features.
Trade and barter in-game assets within the platform's secure marketplace.
From Epic Games
From Steam
Look like Epic Games. Work like Steam.
Drawn from the insights, this list is what made the UI work actionable.
Chapter 02
From a blank slate to a strong narrative, supported by the visuals.
How should it feel? It began at my induction meeting with the CEO, where he talked about why he wanted to start Spawn Point and how the design should feel: quirky, fresh and intuitive, like a universe of characters.
The words from that meeting became a word cloud, and everything that followed grew out of it: the moodboard, the name, the logo, the patterns, the characters, a custom typeface and finally the brand book behind the pitch.
Before the final moodboard, a board full of raw directions. It holds the long logo journey, the very first visual inspiration, the first wireframe visualisations of the platform, and early graphics and character design inspiration.
The very first visual inspiration
Initial wireframe visualisation
Initial graphics inspiration
Character design inspirationEvery early direction on the brand.
Explore the board
"Woah, perfect. So cool, looks so fun." The CEO
Spawn Point comes from the spawn points in games, where every player enters the world and comes back after every loss.
The project started out as AptosPlay. The CEO wanted to keep a "-Play" suffix, but the gamers I asked found it immature, so it went. After long discussions, Spawn Point, one of the names I suggested, was chosen as the final one.
"Every journey starts at the spawn point. So does every comeback."
Two big arcs set the top and bottom edges; two huge ones pinch the sides.
A bold red S: "spawn" in a sophisticated yet quirky form, welcoming and friendly.
A visualisation of the platform's association with cryptocurrency, which will be linked with the in-game currency.
Together, the whole form resembles a location pin on a map.
Keep scrolling to build it
Two segments, two colours. The accents come straight from the research: crimson for the Engaged gamers, the conquerors, and ocean blue for the Value seekers. Ivory and ash ground them.
Bicyclette Ultra for headlines: a bold, rectangular face with softened edges that commands attention without feeling harsh. We went looking for something circular and bold, but readable, and Bicyclette was it. Montserrat balances it for body text and UI.
The pattern lives mostly in the background, so it had to be subtle: an element of the brand that still stands out there, but never overpowers the main elements of a composition. That's why we built it from the coin.
A custom display font, Azuki, was created to carry the brand's personality wherever a display face was needed: mainly the brand book and presentations, and only sparingly in the product itself.
Azuki
ABCDEFGHIJKLM
NOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Two tests for the loading screen. A loader's job is to keep people engaged while they wait, so ours had to come from the brand: the mark, or the pattern.
Characters, not a mascot. Each belonged to the platform itself, not to any one game, with its own personality, backstory and character arc, led by a hero character.
The animation team developed the characters, with their backstories and sketches. The art shown is AI-generated, curated by the team.
The brand book
Logo, colour, type, voice and brand in use, across 40 pages.
Chapter 03
Turning the insights and the brand into a product: architecture, flows, wireframes, then the final screens.
07
To prepare an MVP for testing we first put together an Information architecture and all the essential flows inspired by our final insights.
The flows took their inspiration mostly from our secondary research, and our gamers and developers told us which versions would work better and which were doable.
What could the platform hold? With the insights from the research in hand, we brainstormed what the platform's architecture could actually look like.
How do the others do it? Around the brainstorm we pinned pages from the platforms we studied, sorted into the same sections, to decide how our own pages and flows would work.
After a lot of brainstorming, we landed on this architecture.
We worked on the following essential user flows for the website.
Then came the wireframes, to test the flows before any visual design. They began on paper, then became rough lo-fi pages.
Where the research shows up. The UI was built directly on the wireframes, and each screen went into development as soon as it was designed. Every key screen answers something we heard in the research.
Discover
Your discovery feed: personalised picks instead of an endless library.
Try first
Discovery Point: play a trial before you rent or buy. The CEO pictured it as reels for games; I pushed back that desktop habits aren't mobile ones and that a trial should tease a game, not replace it.
Rent by the hour
Rent by the hour, with longer sessions cheaper per hour. Your progress saves online, so you can renew later and carry on. It's one of three ways to pay, alongside Arcade Sessions for quick escapes and Subscriptions for a routine.
Stay in control
Reminders at 10 and 2 minutes before a session ends, with a one-tap extension.
Own and trade
The market: trade and barter skins and assets across games.
Make it yours
Pre-made themes, applied in one click from settings.
08
Did it hold up? The MVP was reviewed in rounds with stakeholders rather than through a formal usability study. Their feedback reached me through the CEO.
Most stakeholders wanted to lean into complex game design, and the research backed them: deeper games are what attract pro gamers.
The gamers who saw the concept were curious about it.
The UI aesthetics were reaffirmed, with only minimal revisions.
On the road with ICC Camp
Spawn Point went through the first season of ICC Camp (Imagine Creation Combinator), an accelerator for Web3 games, and the brand went with it from Singapore to Hong Kong.
10 March 2024
13–16 March 2024 · Singapore
Four days with 31 Web3 game teams, ending in a demo day at Google Cloud's Asia-Pacific headquarters in front of Web3 gaming investors. Spawn Point came away with a mentor, Blockhive Capital founder Alex Yang.
April 2024 · Hong Kong
A demo day at Brick Lane, and the ICC Camp ceremony at the festival's Web3 Gaming Summit, where Spawn Point was one of five startups on stage.
May 2024
The Google Cloud team met on the tour came on board to help build the cloud architecture.
The pitch we designed for Spawn Point helped the company secure an Aptos grant and Google Cloud architecture support. Soon after, the company changed direction entirely.
Team
