Ashes of Blackridge
Branching dialogue for an AA narrative survival adventure, where you feel the weight of a choice without ever seeing the math (an NDA-safe rebuild of a shipped commercial project)
Role: Game UI/UX Designer · Timeline: 2024 (production) · 2025 (NDA-safe rebuild) · 2026 (UE5 build) · 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. Resources are scarce, alliances are shaky, and a conversation can decide as much as a bullet. 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 is the NDA-safe version of a real shipped project. The thinking, the process and the outcomes are real. Every screen, name and number was rebuilt from scratch for this portfolio.
The Challenge
Branching dialogue comes with 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 system underneath. No “+15 trust” popups. No red “this will have consequences” banner doing the feeling for the player. And around the dialogue sat a full survival layer (vitals, navigation, crafting) that had to stay readable over painterly low-light environments without burying the world under panels.
The Solution
Every dialogue option carries a tone signature (Empathy, Defiance, Caution, Pragmatism), shown through color, icon and the voice of the line itself, plus a small row of pips that hints how far the choice will echo. You can tell a knife from an olive branch at a glance, and the math stays backstage. Under the screens there's a full information architecture (five domains, shared state, cross-system dependencies) where UI views read progression data but never own it. The HUD follows the same restraint, and I didn't get there by taste alone. 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 share one material language: soot, brass, worn paper, and type 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 used the same twelve players as the first round (six newcomers, six genre veterans, the 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. (The figures are reconstructed for the NDA, but faithful to the pattern of the real findings.) On the shipped commercial project, the same approach held up at scale: A/B-tested layouts cut screen-to-screen drop-off by 27%.
Key Takeaways
- Whisper, don't annotate: Players read tone through color, icon and the voice of a line faster than through any explicit label.
- Audit yourself like a hostile stranger: An annotated, prioritized, argued review of your own HUD is the cheapest redesign tool there is.
- Vitals live in peripheral vision: If the player has to look straight at them, they're already too loud.
Deliverables: Information Architecture, Dialogue System, Narrative Patterns, HUD (2 iterations), Playtest & UX Audit, Companion System, Crafting UI, Codex, Wireframes, UE5 Build (UMG, Blueprints)
Gallery
- Running in Unreal Engine 5
- 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)