I joined Escape Velocity as a UX Design Director and eventually took ownership of a broader player-experience initiative centered around the in-game HUD and combat readability.
The challenge was bigger than interface design.
Players don't experience UX, gameplay, VFX, audio, animation, characters, and engineering as separate disciplines. They experience one game. Improving that experience meant bringing several teams together around problems that no single group could solve independently.
My role became less about designing every answer and more about creating the environment where good answers could emerge.
Defining what good looks like
Early on, one of the biggest opportunities was simply creating a shared understanding of quality.
Rather than beginning with features or solutions, we defined the experience we wanted players to have and turned those goals into clear acceptance criteria.
Could the player understand what was happening?
Could they identify important information quickly?
Did the game communicate clearly enough for them to make a confident decision?
Those questions gave teams something concrete to evaluate without prescribing how each discipline had to solve the problem.
That distinction became important.
UX shouldn't tell VFX how to make VFX. Design shouldn't dictate how audio solves a communication problem. My job was to establish the player outcome, provide context and constraints, and give specialists enough room to do their best work.
Building connective tissue
Much of the work lived between teams.
A problem that appeared to belong to the HUD could just as easily originate somewhere else in the experience. Solving it often meant coordinating across gameplay, characters, VFX, audio, engineering, production, and other disciplines.
I helped establish working relationships and pipelines between those groups so we could evaluate problems as part of the complete player experience rather than as isolated departmental tasks.
That changed the conversation.
Instead of asking whether an individual feature was working as designed, we could ask a much more useful question:
Is the game communicating what the player needs to know?
Sometimes the solution involved UX.
Sometimes it didn't.
That was exactly the point.
Creating structure without creating bureaucracy
As the initiative grew, I focused on creating enough structure for teams to move confidently without adding unnecessary process.
That meant establishing ownership, defining expectations, creating acceptance criteria, aligning dependencies between teams, and giving people a shared language for discussing quality.
It also meant knowing when to get out of the way.
The goal wasn't to centralize every decision through me. It was to create a framework strong enough that teams could make good decisions themselves.
Leadership without owning every answer
The work I'm proudest of from this period isn't a single screen or feature.
It's the system around the work.
Bringing disciplines together. Making ambiguous problems understandable. Defining what good looked like. Creating clearer pipelines between teams. Giving talented people enough direction to move together—and enough trust to own their craft.
That's the kind of leadership I try to practice:
Define the outcome. Make ownership clear. Create alignment. Then get your hands out of the sand.