Illuvium Zero

When I joined, Illuvium: Zero was a mobile-only city-builder with a first-pass UI. Open Beta was about to open it to desktop. I redesigned the full UX and UI to work across both form factors, aligned to the broader Illuvium visual style, while working with PMs and game designers on a set of new systems shipping into the same release.

Two challenges, running at once. The visual and interaction model needed to scale from phone to desktop without becoming “phone but bigger” — desktop has different inputs and different expectations, and treating it as a port would have shipped a worse experience on both. At the same time, player research from earlier beta phases had flagged areas where Zero’s systems weren’t landing — players didn’t always understand what features were doing or how the systems related to each other.

Across Private Betas 2 and 3, I ran quantitative surveys with players to assess understanding of Zero’s features at scale, alongside the broader Illuvium research program. The surveys gave us a clear picture of which features were carrying their own weight, which ones needed clearer surfacing, and where the cross-platform redesign needed to do more than visual scaling. Findings fed directly into the redesign brief — what to keep, what to rework, and what new affordances to add for desktop players.

The redesign covered four moving pieces, all running into the same Open Beta deadline:

• Cross-platform UX/UI. Every screen scaled from phone to desktop, with key interactions rethought rather than enlarged so mouse/keyboard and touch each got the experience they deserved.
• Navigation and goal system. Updated nav and a revamped goal system so players could orient inside a denser feature set.
• New systems. Power visualisations for generators, a marketplace for trading fuel and resources, and the megacity feature for combining plots.
• Player guidance. In-game animations to direct attention, path indicators, a reworked goals menu, and clearer visualisation of path growth bonuses and efficiency across structures.

Throughout build, I sat with the dev team auditing designs in engine — catching where the Figma had been honest about behaviour but the runtime told a different story, and where consistency was slipping between screens. That tightened up the experience before Open Beta in a way design files alone couldn’t have.

The UX/UI shipped for Open Beta across mobile and desktop, with the new features landing a noticeably more refined gameplay experience. The design held up across devices — scalable, consistent, and recognisably part of the broader Illuvium world without feeling like a port of the other games.

Designing the same game for two form factors taught me that “cross-platform” is only honest if you’re willing to design two products that happen to share a goal. Desktop doesn’t need to be a bigger phone; it needs to use the things phones can’t — multi-window context, precise cursor control, richer density. Working through those trade-offs on Zero, with survey research feeding the brief, changed how I approach platform strategy on anything with companion apps.