CLIENT
PLATFORMS
SERVICES
Offworld Industries
PC, Consoles
UX, UI, Implementation
Service Guarantees Citizenship
Starship Troopers: Galactic Front is a large-scale live-service feature designed to make an ongoing interstellar war feel legible, alive, and community-driven. Our engagement focused on rethinking how players discover missions, understand their role in a larger conflict, and participate in a seasonal narrative that evolves over time.
Over a three-month engagement, our team led work across UX, UI, narrative design, illustration, and in-engine implementation, helping the client transition from fragmented systems and long queue times to a cohesive Galactic Front experience that prioritized clarity, momentum, and tone.
Deliverables
End-to-end UX Strategy for the Galactic Front System
Fog-of-War Seasonal Timeline System
Redesigned First-Time User Experience
Mission and Matchmaking Overhaul
UI Component Library & Propaganda Development
Character Concept Development & Illustration
the challenges beyond the bug menace
The existing experience made it difficult for players to quickly find meaningful gameplay. Long queue times and unclear mission selection left players disconnected from the larger war effort.
At the same time, the project faced a unique thematic challenge: Starship Troopers is fundamentally satirical and jingoistic, portraying war through propaganda and denial, while video games traditionally need players to feel successful.
The UX needed to reconcile these opposing forces without breaking immersion or undermining player motivation.
The system had to scale across:
Solo players
Coordinated parties
Companies (guilds)
the broader global community
All while supporting live-ops balancing and seasonal storytelling.
“We had the incredible opportunity to collaborate with UXIF Studios on the development of our Company and Galactic Front features over a three-month period. As our one-stop game UX/UI solution, UXIF brought an intuitive and immersive experience right into our engine. Their knowledge and artwork for character work and 3D planetary feature design were invaluable.”
-Chaz Barker
Lead Game Designer at Offworld Industries
Designing a
Living War
Propaganda as a UX Layer
Losses became "strategic retreats." Global threat levels pulsed instead of numbered. Casualty counts reflected the fiction of war — never the player's literal performance. Copy leaned hard into Federation satire, reinforcing tone at every touchpoint without punishing play.
The live-service system stayed flexible. The universe stayed on message.
The solution to the satire/success paradox was framing, not data.
The Galactic Front is a seasonal campaign shaped by collective player effort, where failure is not only possible, it's expected. Rather than leaderboards, we leaned into shared global progress, and the idea that victory is always temporary.
the galactic front
Fog of War & the Living Galaxy
To keep the war feeling unpredictable, and to give live-ops room to breathe, we introduced a fog-of-war timeline. Upcoming events are obscured, major and minor beats unfold dynamically, and community progress can accelerate or stall outcomes.
The front line is never a roadmap.
It's a rumor.
We audited and rebuilt the FTUE around three questions a new recruit should be able to answer within their first session:
What is the Galactic Front?
Where do I go next?
How does my mission contribute?
The redesigned flow contextualizes every action inside the larger war from drop one.
First-Time User Experience
Mission Select & Matchmaking
The mission selection experience was rebuilt from the ground up to cut time-to-play, surface multiple mission types, elevate party and Company play, and fold in seasonal objectives and rewards.
Dynamic planet states, color-coded threat levels, and quick-play affordances let players make faster, more confident drops.
Narrative & Character
Our contribution extended into the game's narrative layer. We concepted and illustrated Sky Marshal Katherine Ramsay as a new face of the Federation war effort, supported legacy characters including Rico, and built a 2D puppet system as a production-flexible alternative when 3D assets weren't feasible at the time of production.
The puppet system doubled as creative insurance, keeping narrative moving without blocking on 3D pipeline capacity.
While our model is no longer in the game, it did inspire the current 3D version of the Sky Marshal and her attire.
Implementation & Reality
Shipping a live-service system at scale means tradeoffs. The redesigned mission select, quick play flow, color-coded planetary states, and propaganda-driven framing all made it in. Some of the more ambitious elements, animated planets, location-based mission pinning, were simplified or cut to meet performance and scope at the time, but, updates are still rolling out from the Offworld Industries team to this day.
features & component library
Beyond feature work, we expanded and restructured the existing UI framework into a proper component library, so that every new feature shipped against a shared system rather than a new one.
UXIF also assisted in crafting planets in 3D for the new Galactic Front display directly in Unreal Engine
Outcome
Friction in mission discovery and matchmaking came down. Players understood the Galactic Front at a glance, and every drop started to feel like part of something larger.
The component system we built gave the team a scalable foundation for seasonal content, ready to grow with the war itself.
The Galactic Front stands as a strong example of what systems-driven UX looks like at scale: a living, legible conflict that gives players purpose, gives live-ops room to breathe, and gives the universe of Starship Troopers a front line worth fighting on.
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