About this role

There is no mouse and no menu anyone scrolls mid-round. The HUD is pure output — score, timer, combo, hit confirmation — projected ten feet wide and read in peripheral vision by someone holding a gun. If it takes a second to parse, it has already failed.

The screens around the round get read by people standing up, at a distance, mid-conversation. A good part of this job is the teaching: the tutorial beats, tips and on-screen instructions that get a first-time player playing within a minute. You design it and the gameplay programmers build it, which makes your specs part of the deliverable.

Every team either builds a new game for Obsidian or takes one already running in the bay and makes it better.

What you’ll do

Design the in-round HUD

Design the projected HUD: score, round timer, hit and miss feedback, combo streaks and game-state indicators.
Make every element legible at bay distance, in a dark room, at a glance.
Design for two readers at once — the player aiming, and the group watching.

Teach without it feeling like teaching

Design the tutorial beats, tips and on-screen instructions that get a first-time player competent fast.
Time and place guidance so it appears when it is useful and gets out of the way immediately after.

Design the screens around the round

Game selection, player setup, results, score reveals, and the leaderboard a group gathers around.
The idle and attract states between games.

Spec it so it actually ships

Build a consistent UI system — type, color, iconography, spacing, hierarchy — that holds up under projection.
Produce layouts, exported assets and specs precise enough for a programmer to build without guessing.
Define every state and transition, and review what ships against what was designed.

What we’re looking for

Required

DigiPen graduate — any graduating class
Portfolio demonstrating interface design: layout, visual hierarchy, type, and iconography
Strong typographic and layout fundamentals — legibility carries this role
Ability to produce specs and exported assets that another person can build from faithfully
Comfort designing an interface nobody can click, hover, or scroll

Ideal degree track

ideal, not mandatory — a strong UI designer from any track is welcome

BFA in Digital Art and Animation

A master’s degree in a related field counts the same as the tracks above — an MS or MFA is equally welcome.

Preferred

Experience designing game UI or HUDs specifically
Experience with onboarding, tutorials, or first-run experiences, especially for people who are not gamers
Experience designing for large-format or “ten-foot” displays — TV interfaces, signage, projection, anything read from across a room
A motion sensibility, even though someone else animates it — knowing what should move, and how fast
Enough familiarity with Unreal UMG or Unity UI to spec within what they can do
Experience reviewing a built implementation against your own design
Interest in themed entertainment or immersive experience design

Work in whatever tools you are fastest in. We care about the output and the clarity of the handoff, not which software produced it.

What you’ll learn

Designing for ten-foot readability and peripheral vision, where most screen-UI instincts are wrong
Designing an interface that is pure output, with no input to fall back on
Teaching a game to a first-time player in a noisy room, in seconds, without a manual and without slowing anyone down
Writing specs good enough to survive a handoff, and holding the line on fidelity afterwards
Designing for a player and an audience at the same time
Working inside a production art team with a shared visual language
Improving an interface real customers already use, which is a different job from designing one from scratch

Compensation

Total hours: 180 hours
Hourly rate: $23.50 / hour
Total earnings: $4,230.00
Expected pace: About 20 hours/week, roughly 9 weeks
Payment: Bi-weekly, direct deposit
Structure: 1099 contractor

The 180 hours are the commitment; the calendar is not. Twenty hours a week for about nine weeks is what we expect in practice, but the weeks don’t have to run consecutively and the pace can flex. We set a schedule with you at the start and work around holidays, travel, and your other commitments.

This is a part-time, paid position and does not include benefits.

How to apply

Apply for this role.

Email [email protected] with UI Designer in the subject line. Send all four of these — an application missing one of them is hard to act on, and we would rather not have to come back and ask.

01Your resumeAttached to the email — PDF preferred.
02Your GPARequired. Include it in the email body.
03A link to your portfolioA video reel and a portfolio site are preferred. Make sure everything opens without a login.
04Your general availabilityThe days and hours you can be on-site and reachable, so we can plan collaboration and playtesting around the people on your team.

Apply — UI Designer

Opens your mail client with the details pre-filled. Attach your resume before you send.