Illuvium Beyond

Illuvium Beyond is the collectible card meta-layer of the Illuvium universe — players pull Illuvitars from D1SKs, fuse them for power, and curate their Beyond Album. I led product design across the Wave 1 and Wave 2 sales pages, the album, and the fusion and customisation flows in 2022, then led a full UX/UI overhaul of the album in 2024.

Beyond sits on a dense set of mechanics: rarities, sets, fusion, finishes, and the relationship between collection completeness and reward eligibility. Players had to understand all of it without a manual. The 2022 work focused on getting players from landing page → D1SK purchase → opening → album view as directly as possible. The 2024 work was different — by then there was a real player base with real frustrations about how the album surfaced (or didn’t surface) progress.

Going into the 2024 overhaul, the team gathered input through surveys and a dedicated Discord forum where players could submit and vote on issues. I synthesised the input into themes and worked with product to prioritise — which frustrations were felt by everyone, which were power-user requests, and which were art/UI tradeoffs the team could resolve with design decisions rather than new features.

A few patterns came up repeatedly:

• The album layout didn’t give Illuvitars enough room to read as art. Players wanted the visuals to breathe.
• Progress was opaque — players didn’t know how close they were to milestones or what counted toward what.
• Filling the album required tedious individual actions where bulk operations would do.
• Rewards and achievements existed, but didn’t feel legible inside the album experience.

The forum gave us volume; the synthesis gave us direction. Working with product and the artists, we grouped the issues into three workstreams: visual clarity (album as a place to look at art), progress and feedback (players knowing where they stood), and bulk interactions (less friction on the things players did repeatedly). Anything outside those three got parked for a future pass.

The 2024 album rebuild shipped against those three workstreams:

• Album visuals reworked alongside the artists so the layout gave Illuvitars the space they needed to read as art, not just assets.
• A new circle-gauge progress system, clearer milestone visibility, and a My Progress section pulling collection milestones, D1SK purchases, and rewards into one view.
• Album-wide fill options to remove the per-card friction.
• A milestone-and-rewards system that made achievements legible without cluttering the album itself.

The redesign delivered a more immersive, visually charged experience that addressed the community’s biggest frustrations with the old album. Players could track progress more clearly, interact with their collections with less friction, and stayed in the loop longer — engaging with the game’s mechanics rather than bouncing off them.

The hardest part of Beyond wasn’t the art or the information architecture — it was deciding where to add juice and where to hold back. Collectible UI breaks when it’s over-animated, and breaks again when it’s too clinical. Collaborating with the game designers and artists to bake power mechanics into visual elements taught me to treat interface as part of the gameplay reward, not a frame around it. The Discord-led research approach also reinforced something useful: a structured feedback channel makes prioritisation tractable in a way that anonymous community sentiment never does.