Illuvium Overworld & Arena

Illuvium runs three interoperable games — Overworld (creature capture and exploration), Arena (autobattler strategy), and Illuvium Zero (city-builder). My remit covered two things in parallel: lead the player research program across Private Betas 1, 2, and 3, and contribute UX/UI design alongside the game UX team on the initial Menu UX/UI for Overworld and ongoing improvements in Arena.

The games were going through staged beta phases with very different unknowns at each one. PB1 introduced Arena’s Survival Mode and the team needed to know whether players could actually understand round structure and combat feedback under pressure. PB2 and PB3 added Overworld and Illuvium Zero, which raised a different question: did players understand the systems on their own terms, or were they leaning on documentation and Discord to fill gaps the UI should have closed? Without structured research, the team would have been iterating on intuition and forum posts.

I worked with game designers at the start of each beta to identify the highest-stakes questions, then designed research frameworks to answer them.

• Private Beta 1 (Arena Survival Mode): screening surveys to select participants who matched the target player profile, followed by one-on-one moderated playtests with structured interviews. The mix gave us behavioural data from the playtest itself plus qualitative depth from the interviews.
• Private Betas 2 and 3 (Overworld + Illuvium Zero): quantitative surveys to assess player understanding of features at scale. Combined with targeted moderated sessions to dig into anything the surveys flagged.

I synthesised everything in Dovetail — coding playtest video, tagging survey responses, and rolling findings into actionable insight reports for the game design team.

Across the betas, a handful of issues kept surfacing as high-impact, low-effort fixes:

• Legibility: key information in moment-to-moment play wasn’t reading at the speed the gameplay demanded.
• Round status indicators in Arena: players were missing where they were in the round flow, especially under pressure.
• The start button: undersized for how often players needed to find it, particularly on smaller displays.
• Illuvial information cards: dense, but the hierarchy didn’t match how players actually compared units.
• Arena results screen: too much going on at end-of-match, slowing the loop between matches.

The Dovetail synthesis output landed with the game design team as prioritised insight reports — what to change, why it mattered, and which players were affected. That gave product and design a shared basis for sequencing changes inside the broader beta roadmap, instead of arguing from anecdote. Things that would meaningfully unblock players moved early; nice-to-haves got parked for later passes.

Alongside the research, I worked with the Game UX/UI designers on design changes that came out of it:

• Overworld: initial Menu UX/UI, plus other tweaks across the experience.
• Arena: rework of the Illuvial information cards to match how players actually compared units, a streamlined results screen, plus minor fixes (legibility, round status indicators, start button sizing) directly tied to research findings.

The research findings drove iteration on Arena’s Survival Mode and made it more user-friendly. Interface improvements across Illuvial cards, the results screen, and the broader UI made the games more accessible. The research framework I set up kept feeding back into Overworld and Illuvium Zero design decisions through subsequent betas.

This project deepened my expertise in end-to-end UX research — from defining the experience goals with game designers, through running and moderating playtests, to synthesising data into insights the team could actually act on. Working with 10+ playtest participants taught me how much the framing of an interview shapes what you learn, and how essential it is to bring findings back as something a designer can pick up and ship — not as a deck nobody re-opens.