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.
This Section still WIP Here - working on an animation
Deliverables
End-to-end UX strategy for the Galactic Front system
Redesigned First-Time User Experience
Mission Select and matchmaking overhaul
UI component library and style guide expansion
Fog-of-war seasonal timeline system
Character concept and illustration (Sky Marshal Katherine Ramsay, Rico support)
2D puppet pipeline for narrative flexibility
Unreal-ready assets and direct implementation support
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.
Designing a Living War
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.
Video animation WIP - going to play on top of planet showing live concept of event
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.
First-Time User Experience
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.
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.
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.
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.
The current version of Rico was also inspired by our original designs with Offworld Industries.
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.
features & component library
STILL WIP BEYOND THIS POINT
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.
Side-by-side of concept vs. shipped screen
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. UX, UI, and narrative pulled in the same direction — a unified voice across systems that had previously fragmented.
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.
Wide shot of the Galactic Front in flight, or a piece of propaganda key art.
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