One interface system for a whole multiplayer city.
HELIX
- Role
- Lead UI/UX Designer (team of 3)
- Client
- Hypersonic Laboratories Inc. · Helix
- Year
- 2022-2023
Design
- Figma
- Photoshop
- LottieFiles
AI
- Midjourney
- ChatGPT
I led the interface for Helix, a user-generated sandbox platform on Unreal Engine 5, and owned the UI for its flagship roleplay mode from first concept to release. I grew a partial design system into one language that stays readable across banking, shops, a casino, police tools, property, and a full in-game phone, and serves four player roles without splitting into one-off screens. The platform has since raised $7M (total $11M, led by Play Ventures).
Research & discovery
Before touching a screen I mapped how four roles actually move through a live session, then pressure-tested the old UI against real play.
of new players never opened the in-game phone, where half the systems live.
longer for first-timers than veterans to finish a bank transfer.
civilian, robber, police, admin. Each one needed the same surfaces to behave differently.
The problem
A live multiplayer world runs dozens of overlapping systems at once: banking, shops, a casino, police tools, property, inventory, a full in-game phone. Four roles use them with opposite goals: civilians, robbers, police, and admins. My job was to grow a partial design system into one coherent language that holds across all of it, stays readable inside a busy 3D world, and serves each role differently without fragmenting into one-off screens.
My role
Lead UI/UX designer in a team of three. On PCO I owned the interface end to end: the design system, every screen and its states, and the interactive Figma prototypes. I drove it from first concept to release (Dec 2022 to 2023).
A system, not a screen kit
I locked the partial palette into semantic roles so meaning reads the same on every screen. The trade-off was a deliberately narrow palette over per-screen freedom. In a crowded 3D scene, instant legibility won.
Colour tokens
Button states
A casino you walk into
The casino is a venue inside the world, with its own interface and a full iGaming suite. I gave every game one shell (balance, bet, potential gain) instead of bespoke layouts, so players learn the pattern once and reuse it at every table.
One system, four roles
Civilians, robbers, police, and admins share the same components and styling, but get different content and permissions. Order and money take context-fitting forms on one set of tokens.
Creating a character, from slot select to registration.
Role tools for police and admins.
A phone that feels like iOS but is legally ours
The in-game phone had to read instantly as a real device without copying iOS. So I built an iOS-familiar phone OS as an original system: recognisable patterns, components that are mine. The double constraint with a star: it is a mobile interface operated by a mouse in-game, so touch ergonomics had to translate to a cursor.
Three in-game apps
On top of the phone OS I designed three apps, each written up as its own case study.
Systems across the city
I built each new screen from the same components rather than to its own logic. That gave up some local optimisation, but it kept the system maintainable as the world grew, so an auto shop, a bank, a weapon shop, a vending machine, the city map, and the in-game dialogue all read as part of one whole.
Inside the auto shop, from tuning to plates.
States, not statics
Every screen was designed as a set of states and prototyped interactively in Figma: hover, selected, installed, revealed, plus the flows between them. It was a hard requirement, since prototypes were how the team reviewed and how the engineers built.
Key decisions, and what they cost
A handful of calls shaped everything downstream across a dozen systems and four roles.
Identity split from function
Colour and iconography carry who you are (role); layout and components carry what you're doing (task). Screens reskin per role instead of forking.
Trade-off: Roles share components, so editing the bank screen ripples to all four. Every change needs a four-role regression pass.
One token set, not per-feature themes
Banking, casino, police and property all draw from a single token scale, so the world reads as one place.
Trade-off: Truly exceptional moments (a legendary drop, a critical alert) are hard to push without bending the scale.
The phone as the systems hub
The in-game phone became the single home for shops, banking and comms, so people learn one model instead of a dozen entry points.
Trade-off: Puts heavy weight on one surface; its information architecture had to be near-perfect.
Prototype every state in Figma
Empty, loading, error and success drawn for each flow before hand-off, so engineering had no guesswork.
Trade-off: Slower hand-off up front; paid back as fewer build-time surprises.
Once the phone became the home for everything, I stopped explaining the UI in onboarding. People just opened it.
Outcome
Helix raised a $7M round (total $11M to date, led by Play Ventures) for the platform I designed the interface for. PCO went from concept to release, and the system was reused and implemented across the platform. My UI appears in the company's showcases and social channels.
raised for Helix (total $11M, led by Play Ventures), the platform I designed the UI for
concurrent players the platform supports
banking, casino, police, property and a phone, unified on one token set across four roles
What I learned
- 01
Separating identity from function let one language serve roles with opposite goals.
- 02
Prototyping every state in Figma caught flows that static screens hide.
- 03
The narrow palette kept the world legible, but it made genuinely exceptional states (a legendary drop, a critical alert) hard to push without bending the system. Next time I'd budget one or two spotlight tokens up front.
- Design
- Ivan Legchilov (lead)
- Team
- 3 designers
- Company
- Hypersonic Laboratories Inc.
- Year
- 2022-2023