Play games, make money, get heckled.
Big Arcade
- Role
- Game UI/UX & Web Design
- Client
- Big Arcade · play-to-earn arcade
- Year
- 2024
Design
- Figma
- Photoshop
AI
- Midjourney
Big Arcade is a play-to-earn arcade: browser games where the leaderboard pays real money. In 2024 I designed one of the games, a light first-person shooter built around an aim-warmup range, and restyled the landing that pitches the whole thing. The read: cash on the line makes a game tense, so I pushed the other way and made it funny. The pause screen says PWNED, a hit taunts you to stay out of shooters, and the whole thing stays light and easy to pick up. The site went electric indigo with a pixel-arcade logo to match.
The brief
Big Arcade pays gamers to play. Win on a browser game, climb the leaderboard, money lands in your account. My job was two things: design one of those games, a quick first-person shooter, and restyle the landing that has to sell 'play games, make money' in about five seconds.
The read
Here is the thing about money games. The second cash is on the line, people tense up, and a tense shooter is a chore. So I went the other way and made it light and silly, low stakes in tone even while the reward is real. A range you can mess around in, dumb taunts when you whiff, a pause screen that calls you a name. Easy to start, hard to take too seriously.
Brand
The landing runs on one loud gradient: near-black indigo climbing to an electric blue that does the shouting, with a pixel-arcade wordmark on top. Old-arcade nostalgia meets a new-money pitch.
Colour tokens
A shooter that jokes with you
The whole game has a grin. Miss a shot and it heckles you, pause and it calls you PWNED. That is the point: the money makes it serious, so the tone keeps it fun.
The landing, restyled
The site has five seconds to land 'play games, earn money'. New look: electric indigo, retro-arcade furniture, and a leaderboard doing the selling with real names and payouts.
The wordmark, too
I proposed the logo as well: a chunky pixel bIGA mark that reads like an arcade cabinet from across the room.
a browser FPS and the site that sells it
PWNED, taunts, low stakes on purpose
one loud gradient, one pixel logo
What I learned
- 01
Tone is a design decision. Making a money game silly did more for approachability than any onboarding flow would have.
- 02
On a landing with five seconds to explain itself, the leaderboard sells harder than a paragraph: real names, real payouts.
- 03
Pulling the game and the site onto one electric-indigo look made a small project read like a real product, not two side gigs.
- Game UI/UX
- Ivan Legchilov
- Web & landing
- Ivan Legchilov
- Logo
- Ivan Legchilov (proposed)
- Year
- 2024