2022 was the year Activision/Solid State Studios recognized my capabilities and brought me on board as UI Artist for the newly released free-to-play multi-player battle royale title Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile (WZM). An exciting new mobile addition to the C.o.D. franchise, touting never-before-seen cross-progression between a player's Warzone and/or Modern Warfare console/PC account; meaning the progress made and items collected on a player's mobile device carried over to the player's console account (or vice-versa).

I personally contributed to both the "Live Ops", "Social" and "Commerce" workstream teams, creating dynamic UI layouts for Weekly Events, The Keep (Lucky Draw / gacha), The Store and also making UI layout adjustments in-game for front-end social features like Party Invites and Channels/Messaging. In addition I participated in bi-weekly sprints, fixed UI bugs and generally assisted the engineering team with bringing features into the game in a timely matter.

This role required extensive mockup work almost exclusively in Figma. Turning UX wireframes into high-fidelity UI mockups and working prototypes, exporting UI elements for our engineers (or perhaps myself) to implement directly into the game via Call of Duty's proprietary IDE (utilizing the LUA/LUI code framework), testing directly on a PC simulator or various Android/iOS mobile devices, then submit final code changes for a swarm review (Helix) to get approval from peers before officially committing them via Perforce (P4V). Afterwards attach a changelist number to the appropriate task's JIRA ticket and close it out.

My most notable (publicly released) contributions to the WZM project are as follows:

I was tasked with taking a colleague's Event UX wireframes and creating the final UI layout, look and feel. At its core this feature is simply a glorified reward track that only requires the user to play the game as normal (getting headshots, triple kills, finding loot boxes, etc) to earn EP. In other words, Event Points (EP) would be earned alongside Experience Points (XP). No further action is needed from the user to earn these Event rewards.

Our main challenge here was being limited to a non-native "web view"/HTML container, which essentially meant our Weekly Events feature was a basic webpage with no ability to display 3D elements. The benefit to using HTML/CSS/web tech for Events was the ability to make live changes or updates on the fly without uploading a whole new version of the game to Google Play/App Store.

Anticipated to be one of the largest revenue generators for WZM, our Keep feature (more commonly known as a "lucky draw" or "gacha" prize system) went through quite a few iterations before reaching its final form.

I personally contributed to the final layout design, spin/reward animations and screen transitions. The main challenge for UI was getting players to understand the feature instantly and engage, without being too flashy or "extra". Or perhaps being perceived as a gimmick or feel like a gambling device within the game.

I spent the later part of my time at Activision working with the Commerce team to bring the UI vision for The Store to life.

Since we also offered bundles from mainline (console/PC) Call of Duty, a big challenge was working with their pre-rendered bundle images and getting them to display nicely alongside our mobile-only offerings.

In 2016 KIXEYE proudly hired and promoted me to Senior UI Artist to take the interface reins of War Commander, an established live-ops strategy battle game coded in Flash (ActionScript 3), boasting a healthy 90,000 MAU playing all over the world, mostly via Facebook inside of a web browser on a desktop computer.

The game's interface needed a serious facelift, and I was allowed to take the dated-looking "Flinstone" theme and give it the sleek, War Commander look it properly deserved.

My typical weekly workflow included, but was not limited to, using Maya 3D and Photoshop to produce eye-popping bitmap images and icons, compressing and optimizing those images and using Adobe Animate to embed into SWF files, using IntelliJ IDE to make any adjustments to AS3 classes, and committing work via Cornerstone SVN, tagging fellow engineers/devs to review committed code changes in Crucible/Fisheye.

In addition to maintaining a nice, consistent UI design across the entire game, I was also responsible for producing highly-detailed title logos for monthly cadence events, as well as creating exciting 3D art promotional banners.

My artistic skill set allows me to push and even step outside the boundaries of conventional UI concepts, while my extensive experience in coding kept me in close ranks with the full-stack Engineers at KIXEYE.

I was the lead UX/UI Designer for the mobile game BeeBorgs, an addicting word-spell game for both Android and iOS.

I was responsible for the entire visual aspect of the game, using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to accomplish wireframing and protoyping all the way to backgrounds and animations and directly implementing some of the core UI in Unity.

Weekly meetings were held with the stakeholders to discuss progress and plan subsequent sprints which resulted in the app being released within six months. Daily communications with the engineering team were conducted via Slack.