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Illuvium Arena

Team Builder is the drafting flow for Illuvium Arena's Ascendant mode, letting players assemble teams from Illuvials, Augments, Armaments, and Armour. I designed the system end-to-end, balancing deep game rules with a UI players could navigate at speed. It launched during Beta 3.

Client Illuvium
Role Product Designer
Services
Product DesignGame UX
Year 2023
Illuvium Arena cover

Overview

I designed the UX and UI for the full drafting system from scratch. That covered team creation and editing, the display and management of team compositions, an import function for sharing pre-configured teams between players, and the browsing experience for Illuvials, Augments, and their stat sheets. The challenge was the sheer density of information: every unit has synergies, counters, and costs that matter at the moment of picking, and none of it can be hidden behind extra clicks.

Illuvium Arena
Illuvium Arena detail

Outcome

Team Builder was used extensively during Beta 3 and gave the team real data on how players assembled compositions under time pressure. Its main shortcoming was structural: the complexity of team assembly pulled players out of the match flow. That finding fed directly into the next iteration, now reworking the system so drafting can live inside the game without interrupting momentum.

What I learned

The hardest call on Team Builder was deciding what surfaces on hover versus what earns a click. Every piece of information wants to be on screen at once; letting that happen would have made it unusable. Working through the hover hierarchy and stat density with the game design team taught me how to treat information architecture as a gameplay mechanic, not just a UI problem. It also made the limits of out-of-game drafting impossible to ignore — a lesson I’d carry into how I scope companion features next time.

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