SNATCHING VICTORY FROM THE JAWS OF DEFEAT

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

UX Strategy, Design & Wireframes
Narrative beats and FTUE Consideration
UI Revamp & Component Library
Character Concepts & Sprites with 2D Puppet Components
Unreal Implementation Services

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.

the role of uxif

We partnered closely with the client’s design, engineering, and narrative teams to define, design, and ship the Galactic Front experience. Our involvement included:

End-to-end UX strategy and system design
UI design and component library creation
Narrative framing and propaganda-driven copy
Character concept design and illustration
Unreal-ready planet and interface assets
Direct implementation support and technical handoff

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While structured as a phased engagement (UX → UI → implementation), UX leadership remained embedded throughout the project to ensure continuity between intent and execution.

the approach

At the heart of the project was the Galactic Front: a seasonal, community-driven conflict where outcomes were shaped by collective player effort — and where failure was not only possible, but expected.

Rather than focusing on competitive leaderboards, the system emphasized: