Notes on game UI

A printed ten-week planner blocking out a UI schedule from discovery to handoff, the handoff week highlighted and a pen note to finish two weeks before the milestone

Hiring & budgets 7 Sep 2026 9 min read

How long does it take to design a game's UI?

Design time and calendar time are two different numbers, and the gap between them is where launch dates go wrong. Here is how long each stage really takes, what makes it longer, and how to schedule interface work so it lands before your milestone rather than after it.

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A premium indie build budget drawn as one 100% bar split by discipline, from art and animation at 35–50% down to production at 5%, with the costs nobody budgets and a 20–30% contingency stacked past the 100% line in orange, and 6–12 months of runway as an arrow running off the scale

Production 9 Sep 2026 8 min read

What a game actually costs to make

Most budgets I see are the cost of building the game and nothing else. The problem is that building it is the part everyone remembers to count, and it is rarely the part that sinks a project.

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The same Apply button built twice: a uGUI Button's Sprite Swap sprites for Highlighted, Pressed, Selected and Disabled, each linked by an amber rule to its UI Toolkit pseudo-class (:hover, :active, :focus, :disabled) in UI Builder's stylesheet

Unity 8 Sep 2026 10 min read

uGUI or UI Toolkit: which to build your game's UI in

Unity ships two UI systems and the internet will tell you the new one wins. It is not that simple: one of them is still what Unity recommends for runtime, and the other is where the development is going. Here is how to choose without betting the project on a forum post.

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A research timeline of one playtester's first ten minutes, with lanes for what was on screen, each verb as it was learned, every hesitation and what they said, and the first 1:52 before any input marked in coral

Game UX 8 Sep 2026 11 min read

The first ten minutes: onboarding that does not feel like a tutorial

Most of the players who will ever quit your game quit in the first session, and most of them quit before anything you were proud of has happened. Onboarding is not the tutorial. It is the shortest path from the icon to the reason they downloaded it.

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Four systems decisions (three currencies, four item states, eleven stats, a modifier that only applies while airborne) wired to the cluttered item screen they force, the airborne modifier's wire landing on the tooltip it needs

Game design 8 Sep 2026 9 min read

Your UI problem is usually a systems problem

When a screen will not come together, the instinct is to redesign the screen. Often the screen is fine and it is being asked to display something that cannot be displayed clearly, because a decision two months upstream made it impossible.

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A type-specimen page where one race timer is set in three frames, once in proportional figures whose right edge drifts 110 px and once in tabular figures under a column ruler whose cells never move, with a footnote about wobbling timers

Visual craft 9 Sep 2026 10 min read

Typography for game UI: the part players read under pressure

Interface type is read in half a second, at speed, over moving artwork, by somebody who did not come to your game to read. Almost every rule that applies to a book works against you here, and the fixes are specific.

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One armoury screen as a grey wireframe, a flow prototype with the focus order drawn on, and a finished screen, each labelled with what a change costs at that stage: twenty minutes, an hour, half a day to a day

Process & craft 9 Sep 2026 9 min read

Wireframes to prototype: how game UI actually gets designed

Clients often expect the first thing they see to look like the game. What they get is grey boxes, and that grey is the point: it is the stage where changing your mind is free, and it is the only stage where anyone reads the layout instead of the art.

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A printed comparison table of asset store kit, freelancer and studio by cost, time to first result, fit, flow and who you talk to, the 'Fits your game' row highlighted as the one that decides most projects, with the kit-plus-freelancer price as a footnote

Hiring & budgets 7 Sep 2026 9 min read

Freelance, studio, or asset store: who should design your game's UI?

I am a freelancer, so treat my conclusion with appropriate suspicion and check the reasoning instead. Here are the three options compared on cost, risk and what actually arrives, including the cases where a kit or a studio beats hiring someone like me.

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A Gantt chart of an indie project from concept, prototype and vertical slice through production, polish and certification to an orange launch line, with an arrow showing the schedule built backwards from the fixed date

Production 9 Sep 2026 7 min read

How long a game takes: prototype to gold

Every project I join has a date. Roughly a third of them hit it. The difference is almost never how fast the team works, it is whether the schedule was built from the phases or from the deadline backwards with hope in the gaps.

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A Unity Profiler where a steady UI band pushes every frame past the 16ms line, the Timeline breaking the selected frame down to Canvas.SendWillRenderCanvases with 400 graphics rebuilt, and the Hierarchy showing one ScoreCounter sharing a canvas with 400 graphics

Unity 8 Sep 2026 11 min read

Why your Unity menus tank the frame rate

The menu opens and the frame time doubles. Nothing in it moves, nothing is expensive to draw, and yet the profiler says the interface is costing more than the game. Here is what is actually happening, in the order it usually happens.

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A printed email from the producer briefing an 18-screen game, ten fields ticked off in blue pen and the budget line 'Around $14,000' highlighted, lying on top of the first page of the attached screen list

Hiring & budgets 7 Sep 2026 11 min read

What to send your UI designer: the brief and asset checklist

Two studios send me the same project on the same day. One gets a firm price and a start date, the other gets a range twice as wide and a list of questions. The difference is almost never the game. It is what was in the first message.

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The five store capsules drawn to one scale and dimmed, each re-cropping one key art with its size labelled, above the small capsule shown at its actual 462 × 174 size and again at 25%, where most players first meet the game

Store & launch 9 Sep 2026 8 min read

Your Steam store page: capsules, screenshots and the first three seconds

Your capsule is a few hundred pixels wide in a scrolling list, next to forty other games, and it gets about a second. That image decides whether any of the years you spent on the game are ever seen.

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An observer's notes sheet from one playtest, the row where the player took 90 seconds to find the upgrade screen and then said 'That was clear' highlighted, beside a fix list showing four of five players hit the same problem

Game UX 8 Sep 2026 10 min read

How to run a playtest that tells you something

You cannot play your own game for the first time, and neither can anyone who built it. A playtest is the only way to see the game the way a stranger sees it, and most teams either skip it or run it in a way that produces reassurance instead of information.

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A step plot of unlocks over six hours of play: four unlocks in the first 20 minutes, widening gaps, then a flat 2 h 45 min stretch across the second wall that spans two whole sessions with nothing unlocked

Game design 8 Sep 2026 9 min read

Progression that keeps players: unlocks, upgrades and pacing

Progression is the reason a player opens the game tomorrow. It is also the system most often designed as a list of numbers and then handed to somebody to fit on a screen, which is why so many upgrade trees feel like admin rather than reward.

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Visual craft 9 Sep 2026 9 min read

Icon design for games: sets that still work at 32 pixels

An icon has about a fifth of a second and a few hundred pixels to say what a thing is. Most game icon sets fail not because the drawings are bad, but because they were drawn large, one at a time, by different rules.

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A printed list of seven hiring channels with their time to hire, referrals ringed in pen as the highest hit rate, beside an index card asking 'Who did your game's UI, and would you hire them again?'

Hiring & budgets 7 Sep 2026 11 min read

Where to find a game UI/UX designer: every channel, compared

There are about ten places worth looking, and they are good at different things. Here is what each one is actually like, how to search it properly, what you should expect to pay, and the outreach message that gets a reply.

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A milestone track where M3 is accepted and M4, inventory and shop screens, is declared at risk two weeks out and moved a week, above a definition-of-done grid where the shop screens still have open states

Production 9 Sep 2026 8 min read

Running milestones: definitions of done, sign-off and slippage

A milestone that says "UI pass" is not a milestone, it is a hope with a date attached. I have delivered against both kinds, and the difference in how the month goes is not small.

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The same quest panel twice on a design canvas: before, with pink redlines showing edges at four different offsets and uneven gaps; after, with one shared left edge, gaps from a spacing scale, one type family and one radius

Process & craft 7 Sep 2026 10 min read

Your game UI looks amateur. Here is usually why

It is almost never talent, and it is almost never the artwork. It is eight small failures of consistency that stack up until a screen looks unfinished. Here is each one, why it happens, and the order I would fix them in.

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A Unity Project window open on a UI kit's Buttons folder showing btn_base and its variants, next to an Inspector on btn_primary that names btn_base as its base and marks its two overrides

Unity 8 Sep 2026 10 min read

Prefabs, variants and a Unity UI kit that survives the project

Six months in, changing a button means opening forty screens. That is not a Unity problem, it is a structure problem, and it is decided in the first week by whether the interface was built as components or as pictures of screens.

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A menu map whose screens carry team names like Meta, Config and Loadout Manager, the names players used written under them, and one player's numbered route to change their loadout through two dead ends in seven presses

Game UX 8 Sep 2026 9 min read

Where do I go? Navigation, menus and wayfinding

Players say they are lost about two completely different things: they cannot find the screen they want, and they cannot find the place they are meant to go. Both are navigation, both are cheap to fix early, and both are invisible to the people who built the game.

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Three fanned index cards of studio call notes in blue pen: Studio A on top with every vetting check ticked and its name highlighted, Studio B behind it crossed out for having no named team, and Studio C with a vague answer and no paid pilot

Hiring & budgets 7 Sep 2026 10 min read

How to find a game development team you can trust

"I need a team" usually means one of four very different things, each with a different cost, a different risk and a different place to look. Here is how to work out which one you need, who to hire first, and how to check that the people you find can actually deliver.

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A timeline of seconds from death to playing again, marked at 2, 5, 15 and 30 seconds: a 34-second path through death animation, game over, level select, cutscene and loading, against 1.8 seconds when Retry holds focus

Game design 8 Sep 2026 9 min read

Difficulty, failure and the moment players quit

Players will fail your game hundreds of times and keep playing. They will also fail once and close it forever. The difference is not how hard the game is, it is what failing costs them and whether they understood it.

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The game drawn as stacked layers of interface, art, audio, performance and design, with one narrow orange column cut through all of them at shipping quality, set in the core loop away from the tutorial and the finale

Production 9 Sep 2026 7 min read

The vertical slice: what goes in it, and what to leave out

A vertical slice is one narrow column of your game taken through every layer at shipping quality. Not a demo of everything at sixty percent, which is what most teams build and what no publisher is asking for.

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A recycled scroll view in Unity: the Hierarchy holds only ten pooled rows, the Inspector lists 500 items with a pool of 10, and the Scene view shows rows drawing items 212 to 219 with two spare rows waiting outside the viewport

Unity 8 Sep 2026 11 min read

Inventories, shops and leaderboards: fast lists in Unity

The inventory opens and the game stutters. Five hundred items became five hundred GameObjects, each with a layout group, all instantiated in one frame. Long lists are the most common performance and usability failure in game interfaces, and both halves are fixable at design time.

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Logos & identity 7 Sep 2026 9 min read

Game logo design: what makes one work, and what it costs

A game logo has a harder job than a company logo. It has to work as a Steam capsule, an app icon, a 16-pixel favicon, a watermark on a stream and a print on a t-shirt, often in one colour. Here is what makes one survive that, and what it costs to get.

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A printed draft job post edited in blue pen: 'Rockstar UI wizard wanted!' and the other vague lines struck through, with the role, a screen list, a $4,000–$6,000 budget and a paid test task written in, and the reply-within-5-days promise highlighted

Hiring & budgets 7 Sep 2026 10 min read

How to write a game UI job post that gets good applicants

Experienced designers read twenty posts a week and reply to two. The difference is never the budget, it is whether the post shows that you know what you are asking for. Here is what to include, a template you can copy, and the phrases to delete.

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A specimen ink card listing eleven interface colours by role, each with its hex, contrast against the ground and a greyscale proof chip, where a bracket marks success and danger printing as the same grey so only their icons tell them apart

Visual craft 9 Sep 2026 9 min read

Colour in game UI: a palette that sits on top of your game

Your interface sits on top of artwork somebody spent months on, in a scene whose colours change every second. That is a different colour problem from designing a poster, and most game palettes fail because they were built like one.

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A to-scale plan of a player in a headset with distance rings at 1, 1.5, 2 and 3 m and the 1.5–3 m band marked as where UI goes: a panel curved on the player's radius stays 2.00 m away while a flat one of the same width reaches 2.26 m at its end

VR & immersive 7 Sep 2026 11 min read

VR UI/UX design: what changes when the interface is in the room

In VR the interface is not on the screen, it is in the room with the player, and most flat-screen habits actively hurt. Here is what changes, which rules are comfort constraints rather than preferences, and how to design an interface people can use for an hour without taking the headset off.

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A main-menu artboard with Continue first and focused, showing the chapter and play time, pink redlines numbering the focus order and its wrap, and a comment thread on why Continue goes first once a save exists

Process & craft 7 Sep 2026 9 min read

Main menu design: what every game menu needs

It is the first screen anyone sees, it appears in every screenshot you will ever take, and it is usually designed in an afternoon near the end of production. Here is what belongs on it, in what order, and the decisions that make it feel like a real game rather than a template.

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Thirteen frames of one press on a shop's Buy button at 60 fps where nothing changes for 200 ms, so the player presses again and the wallet drops from 2,000 to 0, above a feedback spec showing this build's control response is missing

Game UX 8 Sep 2026 9 min read

Feedback: how a game tells the player it heard them

A player presses a button and nothing happens for a quarter of a second. In that silence they press again. Everything that goes wrong next, the double purchase, the cancelled action, the sense that the game is unresponsive, comes from a gap that was never designed.

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A Sankey diagram of one coin economy, sources such as run payouts and quests flowing into the balance and out to sinks such as upgrades and potions, ribbon width showing each one's share of coins per hour, beside a price column where an upgrade at 1,000 is five runs at about 200 a run

Game design 8 Sep 2026 8 min read

Currencies, sinks and prices: an economy players understand

An economy is a set of numbers with a communication problem attached. Players do not experience your spreadsheet, they experience whether they can afford the thing they want and whether earning it felt worth the time. Both of those are decided as much on the screen as in the balance.

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A spec drawing of a phone in portrait with a right thumb's reach arc splitting the screen into natural, stretch and hard zones, hatched safe-area insets, the close button alone in the far top corner and a 64–80 pt Play button inside the arc

Mobile & handheld 7 Sep 2026 12 min read

Mobile game UI design: thumb zones, safe areas and the screens that pay

A phone is not a small monitor. It is held in one hand, in motion, often in daylight, and part of the screen is covered by the thumb that is playing the game. This is what actually changes when you design a game interface for mobile, and which screens are worth the most of your budget.

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An issued vendor quote with an item, quantity, rate and amount grid for UI/UX screens, 3D assets, animation, localisation and QA totalling a highlighted $31,500, where in pen the client adds their own time and rework and circles roughly $38k, over a note on what an in-house hire costs

Hiring & budgets 7 Sep 2026 10 min read

Game development outsourcing: what it costs and how to manage it

Outsourcing is priced as a fee and paid for in fee plus management. Here is what each discipline actually costs, how that compares to hiring once you count everything an employee costs, the line items that never appear in a quote, and how to run the work so it lands.

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A scope review on cards sorted into Core, Valuable, Nice and Vanity, with an orange cut line: crafting, a second character, console at launch and multiplayer are struck through, giving 135 days back on the schedule

Production 9 Sep 2026 8 min read

Scope: cutting a game down to something you can finish

Almost every unfinished game was finishable at some point. The moment it stopped being finishable is rarely dramatic: it is a series of reasonable additions, each of which made the game better and the project longer.

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A Unity Scene view in perspective of a greybox room with a world-space canvas on a pedestal measured at 1.92 m by 1.08 m, beside an overlay listing Render Mode World Space, 1920 × 1080 and Scale 0.001

Unity 8 Sep 2026 11 min read

World-space UI in Unity: screens in the room, not on the glass

A canvas set to World Space arrives one thousand units wide, blurry, and behind the wall. None of that is a bug. World-space UI has its own rules for scale, legibility and interaction, and they are the difference between a hologram and a smeared texture.

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A TV showing a level-select grid with its navigation map drawn on: first focus on level 6, a locked level skipped, down from 8 landing on 10 on the ragged last row, shoulder buttons changing tab, and the 5% title-safe margin, beside a generic gamepad

Console & controller 7 Sep 2026 12 min read

Designing game UI for controllers: focus, navigation and console requirements

A gamepad has no cursor. The player cannot point at anything, so every screen has to know where focus starts, where it goes next, and what it looks like when it lands. Get that wrong and a menu that looked perfect in Figma feels broken in the hand.

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A launch tracker reading 35 days to go, beside the last-eight-weeks checklist grouped by weeks out, with the freeze and test passes ticked and the release candidate and submission as this week

Store & launch 9 Sep 2026 6 min read

The last eight weeks: a launch checklist

The last eight weeks are not the last eight weeks of development. They are a different job: freezing, checking, submitting, and resisting the urge to add one more thing.

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A printed portfolio-review scorecard with five checks, from full flows to evidence of implementation, each scored 1–5 with a pen ring, 'Full flows, not single screens' highlighted and 'could my developer build from this? yes' written underneath

Hiring & budgets 25 Aug 2026 12 min read

How to hire a game UI/UX designer

Most bad UI hires are decided before anyone talks money. They come from hiring the wrong role, judging a portfolio on its prettiest image, and writing a brief too vague to quote against. Here is how to avoid all three, and how to run the project once someone is on it.

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An accessibility settings screen grouped by what the player needs, with subtitles, background plate, speaker names and sound captions on, text size at 150%, and a live preview of a two-line subtitle on a dark plate at 4.5:1 contrast

Accessibility 7 Sep 2026 12 min read

Game UI accessibility: the settings players actually ask for

Most accessibility complaints about games are complaints about the interface, and most of them are cheap to prevent and expensive to retrofit. This is what to build in while the screens are being designed, in the order that helps the most players per hour of work.

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A motion-specimen plate plotting a panel's 220 ms ease-out with one dot per frame and half the distance marked at the third frame, above keyframe tracks measuring content at +60 ms and rows 30 ms apart capped at 6, beside the spec set as a colophon

Visual craft 9 Sep 2026 9 min read

UI animation: motion that helps, and motion that shows off

Good interface motion is invisible: the player knows where they are and never waits. Bad interface motion is the first thing a reviewer mentions, and it is almost always the same handful of mistakes made with good intentions.

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A copy deck of UI strings with the vague versions struck through and the rewrites beside them, led by 'Are you sure?' becoming 'Sell Ironbrand Blade?', with the finished Sell / Keep dialog pinned next to it

Game UX 8 Sep 2026 9 min read

The words in your game: buttons, tooltips, errors and item text

Every string in your game is interface. The button that says OK, the tooltip that describes a stat nobody understands, the error that says something went wrong. These are the cheapest things in the game to fix and among the most expensive to get wrong.

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The same shop offer drawn twice: a pressure version with a faint close button, a resetting timer, mystery contents, a gem-only price and a confirmshaming opt-out, and a clarity version with one-tap close, itemised contents, a real price and Not now and Buy buttons of equal width

Shops & monetisation 7 Sep 2026 11 min read

Shop, battle pass and offers: designing monetisation players do not resent

The shop is the screen where a player decides whether they trust you. It is also, in most free-to-play games, the screen that was designed last, by whoever was free. Here is how to design one that sells well because it is clear, rather than in spite of being confusing.

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A small team's pipeline drawn as an orange loop following one icon from source art and export through version control, the nightly build, the shared drive, the weekly playtest and feedback to the task board, around 'Under an hour'

Production 9 Sep 2026 8 min read

Tools and pipeline for a small game team

Nothing about tooling is interesting until the day someone overwrites three days of work, or the build machine turns out to be one laptop. The setup that prevents both is a couple of days at the start of a project and it is never a couple of days later.

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Four prototype screens stepping down from the main menu to a shop four levels deep, past a pink three-level ceiling, with a playtest comment asking to move the shop up a level

Process & craft 7 Sep 2026 11 min read

Game UX design: what it actually is, and when your game needs it

UX is the part people cannot see and cannot stop feeling. It is not how the menu looks, it is whether players understand your game, get through the first ten minutes, and can find the thing they came for. Here is what the work is, and how to tell whether your game needs it.

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A roguelike's core loop drawn as five verbs with a repeat arc, the screens each step needs listed beneath, more outside the loop, and a tally where a first guess of 12 screens becomes 23

Game design 8 Sep 2026 9 min read

From core loop to screen list: turning a design into something you can build

A design document says what the game is. A screen list says what has to be built, in what order, and what it will cost. Turning the first into the second is a half-day of work that most projects skip, and then spend the rest of production paying for.

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A Unity Inspector with a close button's Rect Transform set to the top-right anchor preset, anchors and pivot at 1, 1 and position -32, -32, beside the Scene view of a settings screen with both 32 px margins measured

Unity 7 Sep 2026 12 min read

Designing game UI for Unity: a handoff that actually gets built

The gap between a design and a built interface is where most game UI quality is lost. This is what Unity actually needs from a design, why layouts break when they hit a real resolution, and the handoff package that gets your screens built the way you drew them.

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A printed freelance rate card on a desk listing four scopes from $240 to $21,000, with the complete menu flow row highlighted and marked in pen as a small game, start to finish

Hiring & budgets 18 Aug 2026 14 min read

What game UI/UX design actually costs in 2026

The honest answer is a range, not a number. My rate is $30 an hour, so here is what each kind of job costs at that rate, what sits behind it, how the price moves with platform and genre, and how to write a brief that gets you an accurate quote instead of a guess.

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A notebook page headed 'UI budget: $3,000' listing the four screens to design first, with credits, achievements and secondary lists crossed out below the line where the money runs out

Indie dev 5 Sep 2026 10 min read

Indie game UI on a budget: what to design first

If you can only afford to get four screens right, these are the four. Here is the order I would spend an indie budget in, what each of those screens has to contain, where a kit will do, and what you can fix yourself for nothing.

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A snowy gameplay artboard whose HUD makes all seven mistakes, from loud bordered panels and health as 847 / 1200 to tiny footer text and a white compass on a white sky, each marked with a numbered pink callout and listed on a review card

HUD & in-game 1 Sep 2026 11 min read

Seven HUD mistakes that make players quit

Players rarely say "the HUD is bad". They say the game feels cluttered, or confusing, or cheap, and then they refund it. These are the seven causes I find most often, what each one is really costing you, and how to check your own game against them.

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All articles

How long does it take to design a game's UI?

What a game actually costs to make

uGUI or UI Toolkit: which to build your game's UI in

The first ten minutes: onboarding that does not feel like a tutorial

Your UI problem is usually a systems problem

Typography for game UI: the part players read under pressure

Wireframes to prototype: how game UI actually gets designed

Freelance, studio, or asset store: who should design your game's UI?

How long a game takes: prototype to gold

Why your Unity menus tank the frame rate

What to send your UI designer: the brief and asset checklist

Your Steam store page: capsules, screenshots and the first three seconds

How to run a playtest that tells you something

Progression that keeps players: unlocks, upgrades and pacing

Icon design for games: sets that still work at 32 pixels

Where to find a game UI/UX designer: every channel, compared

Running milestones: definitions of done, sign-off and slippage

Your game UI looks amateur. Here is usually why

Prefabs, variants and a Unity UI kit that survives the project

Where do I go? Navigation, menus and wayfinding

How to find a game development team you can trust

Difficulty, failure and the moment players quit

The vertical slice: what goes in it, and what to leave out

Inventories, shops and leaderboards: fast lists in Unity

Game logo design: what makes one work, and what it costs

How to write a game UI job post that gets good applicants

Colour in game UI: a palette that sits on top of your game

VR UI/UX design: what changes when the interface is in the room

Main menu design: what every game menu needs

Feedback: how a game tells the player it heard them

Currencies, sinks and prices: an economy players understand

Mobile game UI design: thumb zones, safe areas and the screens that pay

Game development outsourcing: what it costs and how to manage it

Scope: cutting a game down to something you can finish

World-space UI in Unity: screens in the room, not on the glass

Designing game UI for controllers: focus, navigation and console requirements

The last eight weeks: a launch checklist

How to hire a game UI/UX designer

Game UI accessibility: the settings players actually ask for

UI animation: motion that helps, and motion that shows off

The words in your game: buttons, tooltips, errors and item text

Shop, battle pass and offers: designing monetisation players do not resent

Tools and pipeline for a small game team

Game UX design: what it actually is, and when your game needs it

From core loop to screen list: turning a design into something you can build

Designing game UI for Unity: a handoff that actually gets built

What game UI/UX design actually costs in 2026

Indie game UI on a budget: what to design first

Seven HUD mistakes that make players quit

Have a game that needs an interface?