Narrative-Driven UI Systems Design – Sunday Gold
Sunday Gold is a narrative-rich, point-and-click adventure RPG blending cinematic storytelling, turn-based combat, and puzzle-solving mechanics. Its hybrid genre posed a unique UI/UX challenge: merging immersive, stylized design with deep RPG systems while maintaining clarity and responsiveness for a desktop audience.
As Senior UI Artist and UX Designer, I led design and implementation for several core systems — including the Inventory, Mission Board, Jukebox, Combat HUD, and Dialogue UI. Each feature required balancing the game’s noir-punk art direction with accessible functionality for players navigating dense layers of information.
Key Contributions
Dialogue UI System: Designed an interface that reinforced the game’s digital comic-book / interactive movie aesthetic. User testing consistently highlighted how this system heightened narrative immersion.
System & HUD Design: Created UX flows and wireframes for combat, exploration, and inventory management; reorganized information hierarchy for faster scanning and clearer objectives.
Diegetic & Stylized Interfaces: Developed immersive UI such as the Jukebox, integrating in-world feedback while maintaining usability.
Design Systems Thinking: Built modular components, hover states, and animation logic reusable across game modes and future updates.
Collaboration & Integration: Partnered with narrative, engineering, and production teams to refine feedback loops, transitions, and pacing across systems.
By unifying stylized visuals with clear, responsive functionality, I helped craft a cohesive UI/UX system that supported the hybrid gameplay and reinforced Sunday Gold’s noir-punk identity.
The bar stage introduced as the hero's initial HQ, also where the Jukebox is located.
The skeuomorphic UI for the Jukebox: including track selection, playback mode, track info and visualizer
The narrative cutscene UI as one of my main contributions to SG
The Mission Board UI in 3 main stages, adds to the cinematic vibe to the game referencing alot of detective movie tropes where items (clues) gathered gradually form a broader perspective for the narrative
Prototyping the UX for the Mission Board
Another example of skeuomorphic UI design I've designed for in game obstacles such as coded trap doors.
One of my very first major task joining the team was to redesign the inventory system based on previous user test data. The version below is my updated version.
Early HUD explorations on the Unique Sunday Gold Hero Well-being system (HP, Stress and Anxiety level meter)
Mockup iterations for combat HUD