Ashes of Blackridge
Branching dialogue for an AA narrative survival adventure — the player feels the tone and weight of every choice without ever seeing the math. An NDA-safe rebuild of a shipped commercial project.
Role: Game UI/UX Designer · Timeline: 2024 — 2025 · Team: AA studio team (NDA) · Platform: PC / Console
Narrative UI, Dialogue System, Survival UX, AA Production
Overview
Ashes of Blackridge is an AA narrative survival adventure set in a dying mining town in 1897: scarce resources, uneasy alliances, and conversations that decide as much as bullets do. I designed the UI systems around one promise — the player should feel the tone and consequence of every choice in their gut, not read them off a stat sheet. This case is the NDA-safe version of a real shipped project: the thinking, process and outcomes are real, while every screen, name and number was rebuilt from scratch for this portfolio.
The Challenge
Branching dialogue has an ugly trade-off: honest systems look like spreadsheets, and pretty ones hide what matters. The brief was to make every reply communicate two invisible things — its emotional tone and the weight of its consequences — without exposing the underlying system. No “+15 trust” popups, no red “this will have consequences” banner doing the feeling for the player. Around the dialogue, a full survival layer (vitals, navigation, crafting) had to stay readable over painterly low-light environments without burying the game world under panels.
The Solution
Every dialogue option carries a tone signature — Empathy, Defiance, Caution, Pragmatism — expressed through color, icon and the voice of the line itself, plus a discreet row of pips signalling how far the choice will echo. You read a knife or an olive branch at a glance; the math stays backstage. Under the screens sits a full information architecture — five domains, shared state, cross-system dependencies — where UI views read progression data but never own it. The same restraint drives the HUD, and it wasn't reached by taste: the first iteration went through a moderated playtest, the findings became a written audit — what works and why, what changes and at what cost — and the audit became the second iteration. Crafting, companion and codex screens extend one material language: soot, brass, worn paper, and typography that could have been set in 1897.
Results
A complete UI kit across the core loops — dialogue, companions, crafting, codex, menus — with the HUD documented as a full research loop: first iteration, playtest, argued audit, rebuild, re-test. The re-test ran with the same twelve players as the first round — six newcomers, six genre veterans, same dusk-and-storm scenarios, only the HUD changed: the objective-recall probe went from seven of twelve to twelve of twelve, and time-to-orient dropped by roughly a third (figures reconstructed for NDA, faithful to the pattern of the real findings). On the shipped commercial project the same approach was validated at scale: A/B-tested layouts cut screen-to-screen drop-off by 27%.
Key Takeaways
- Players read tone through color, icon and the voice of a line faster than through any explicit label — a dialogue system should whisper, not annotate
- Auditing your own HUD like a hostile stranger — annotated, prioritized, argued — is the cheapest redesign tool that exists
- Survival vitals live or die in peripheral vision: if the player has to look straight at them, they are already too loud
Deliverables: Information Architecture, Dialogue System, Narrative Patterns, HUD (2 iterations), Playtest & UX Audit, Companion System, Crafting UI, Codex, Wireframes
Gallery
- The System Map (1 image)
- Dialogue: Tone & Consequence (1 image)
- Narrative Patterns: How the Branches Work (1 image)
- HUD, First Iteration (1 image)
- The Playtest: Method
- The Playtest: Findings
- UX Review: What Works (1 image)
- UX Review: What to Change (1 image)
- HUD, Second Iteration (1 image)
- Companions: Trust as an Interface (1 image)
- Blacksmith: Craft & Upgrade (1 image)
- Codex: The World on Paper (1 image)
- Title & Menus (3 images)
- Wireframes (7 images)