As the Lead, UI/UX and Narrative Designer, I helped develop this third person action combat experience from the ground up.
Dual Shadows is a neon-drenched third person action game set in a cyberpunk setting. As the Lead Designer, I had the privilege of shaping the final product alongside an interdisciplinary team of talented developers. My work consisted of a variety of design roles, which allowed me to connect threads between each, unifying the experience for the player.
Overview
- Team Size: Thirteen (13) + Four (4) Contractors
- Development Time: Nine (9) months
- Engine: Unreal Engine 5
- Released: June 2025
- Platform: Windows
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Lead Design
From August to December 2024, I served as the Team Lead for Dual Shadows, focusing on implementing SCRUM and Agile practices for a team of eight (8) while managing design responsibilities, which enhanced my understanding of pipelines, communication, and conflict resolution (along with using Jira and Confluence).
As the team lead some of my responsibilities included:
- Leading meetings, setting meeting objectives and agendas.
- Making sure teammates participate in the stand-up and share updates on their tasks.
- Writing meeting notes to keep track of action item progress.
- Holding tri-weekly one-on-ones with each teammate to get their unfiltered takes on the project.
- Opening and closing sprints, setting sprint goals and prioritizing the backlog.
January to April 2025 my role had shifted as we onboarded five (5) new developers and grew to a thirteen (13) person size team. I was selected by the team to be the Lead Designer, retaining my responsibilities over UI/UX while also having to head the games’ narrative script, systems and voice acting.
As the Lead Designer I took what I learned from my previous production role and applied it to running the design team. This helped maintain organization and consistent communication not only with other disciplines, but within the design team as well.
UI/UX Design
Early in development, the team had selected a prototype that played into two different forms of combat. A ranged form for precision and a melee form for crowd control. The goal was to appeal to the duality between the two, and give players the agency to play the game in whichever form they preferred. Both of these forms had an ultimate form, a unique ability, and a combined ultimate form if both ranged and melee mana was full. Finding a way to convey all of this to the player without cluttering the screen or slowing down the experience was my primary objective.
I initially created a “clamp” layout to provide the player with most of the information they needed in one central location. Player health, chosen combat form, ability mana, and ultimate mana were all visually indicated within the clamp.
Through testing it was determined that players were still struggling to comprehend the interface and its many components. It was contained, but difficult to distinguish which element was representing the corresponding player action or ability.
My second iteration had a lot of promise early in the design process. Notable improvements to the interface included:
- Notched health for health indication clarity.
- A shell for the notches that provided feedback for form ultimate mana.
- Designated ability diamond that reacted to player input.
This design was ultimately cut for a few reasons. First and foremost being that the health system was not designed to function with notched health. Secondly, the amount of elements on screen may have broken down the information, but it appeared less organized than the “clamp” design we previously employed.
On the gameplay side of things, ultimate forms were cut and mana was now to be used to activate form-specific abilities. This reduced the amount of information needed to comprehend the interface significantly and paved the way for what ended up in the final product.
While never implemented, this design ultimately led to the final iteration, which combined a lot of these elements in one dedicated area to reduce screen clutter.
The ability diamond influenced the creation of the Hel-X. This new design used the space in between each ability to display mana the player had gained with intersecting progress bars.
The progress bars only displayed themselves to the user if the corresponding stance was active – a simple but effective way to reduce HUD elements and communicate necessary information.
The health bar was placed below the Hel-X to centralize players attention in one area. However the design intention for the Hel-X to represent a double helix was still unclear.
The final adjustment that needed to be made was rotating the Hel-X ninety (90) degrees, giving it a more vertical, double helix-like appearance.
The diamond layout of the abilities aligned seamlessly with the buttons used to trigger them on a controller, adding an extra layer of clarity for the player and greatly improving the user experience.
Narrative Design
Due to an unfortunate lack of resources to pull off the story I wanted to tell, the narrative took up a lot of my time during development. I had rewritten the story three (3) times before finalizing it in order to deliver something in scope while also ensuring it would be a script the team could be proud of.
Before and in between major segments of gameplay, there was initially going to be 2D cutscenes intended to give more of a comic-book feel to the story. Despite providing exposition and more structured pacing to the story, these cutscenes were ultimately cut.
Regardless of these setbacks, building the city of Pulsanh, it’s characters, and the context for the events in the game were all exciting pieces of the Dual Shadows puzzle.
Writing with the knowledge that player choice needed to impact both the story and gameplay was also another obstacle that needed to be hurdled. The way this was achieved was by presenting the player with the option to absorb or release the defeated boss. This choice altered the narrative path the player experienced while also providing unique abilities to use in combat.
The trickiest problem to tackle was what happened when the player chose to release one boss but absorb the other. In that instance the player was given unique dialogue followed by a third and final choice which allowed them to decide their own destiny. This truly put the game in the players hands and centralized every decision and narrative beat on the player character.
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