A cozy gardening and farming simulation game where you play as a hive of bees. Players design their perfect garden, nurture wildflowers and crops, and meet a local cast of interesting characters!
I worked as the UX/UI lead on Honey Grove, closely working with the game, narrative and technical directors of the project. Here I worked to ensure that the game experience felt good to the player and that the UI was cohesive, functional, accessible and fit for purpose. I joined in the Alpha phase, just as an early access build went live and worked on the game through production, iterating the UX and UI of the game along the way.
Honey Grove is a large game with many interconnected game scenes & mechanics. When I joined the project it became clear that we needed to map out these different areas to understand the user flow between them.
This helped us understand:
This outlined that the game needed to move back and forth a little more. And allowed us to make changes to the tutorial to ensure that the player got used to moving between the scenes. It also resulted in moving some game mechanics around.
Keeping the game scenes in mind helped a lot designing features such as Crafting, the Forest Friends, and Stores. And for larger live events we knew we would be adding.
Maintaining UX flows allowed us to understand how the live events would fit into the overall game design and flow, and how the balance might shift + should be maintained.
The UI Design work in Honey Grove was highly iterative, both to create the best possible designs, but also to account for slight style shifts within the game's development. Early work I did was to bring a more consistent approach to layouts and button styles to create better player associations with different mechanics (as well as to assist the player moving between scenes smoother).
The early style guide of the game lent towards "80s nostalgia as well as big and bubbly feeling", which inspired darker browns to go with bubbly icons and thick strokes.
Original UI from the prototype
My first Redesign
The style of the game continuously evolved through development until it settled into what it looks like today. Softer, more storybook style, while still maintaining good contrast in the UI elements and strong use of a more pastel pallete.