Case Study
Re-designing a Cyberpunk RPG for Web3
In 2020, Blockade Games released the MVP of Neon District, a cyberpunk role-playing game where players competed for Neon (an in-game currency), weapons and armour to equip their characters, build stronger teams and defeat opponents to steal their resources. Assets players earned could be traded as NFTs on public marketplaces such as OpenSea, and the MVP, a first of its kind, had built a loyal fanbase in the cryptocurrency community. I initially joined the team to run a UX study, which led into a full-time product design role: taking the findings from research through problem statements, flows and wireframes into a full design system, a new-user onboarding experience and a ground-up combat UI.
- My role
- Lead Product Designer
- Contribution
- UX ResearchUI DesignDesign SystemPrototypingDesign Handover
- Team
- 1x UI Designer1x Creative Director1x Design Director1x Art Director1x Narrative Writer6x Engineers (including the CTO)2x Artists
- Duration
- 2021–23
- Status
- Never launched; funding pulled in January 2023
Context & Challenge
Neon District had something most products would kill for, a passionate community, but the MVP carried real UX debt. The brief was to improve the experience of the existing game across login and registration, Web3 wallet connection and the payment gateway, browser-based Web3 game mechanics, the combat interface, leaderboards, team management and asset management. That is close to the entire surface of the product, in a genre with almost no established conventions to lean on, for an audience that ranged from crypto-native early adopters to players who had never held a wallet.
The deeper challenge was that money was involved. Players' characters, weapons and armour were tradable assets with real value, so confusion wasn't just friction, it was a trust problem.
Approach
Start with evidence, not opinions.
I ran a survey built around 11 predefined tasks, asking players to record their screens as they attempted each one, score it, and optionally explain the score. Screen recordings alongside scores meant we could see where people actually got stuck rather than where they remembered getting stuck.
Theme the results, then write problem statements.
Four themes came out of the analysis: navigation and layout, lack of gameplay direction, lack of system feedback, and UI inconsistencies. I wrote a problem statement for every task, plus one key problem statement that framed the whole project:
Players struggle to understand the game and navigate from task to task as they are unsure of what to do. We should come up with a solution that makes it easier to understand the game so that they enjoy it more and are more likely to return and potentially spend money.
Writing them per task kept the work specific. Equipping armour, for example, wasn't just "hard to use": characters loaded too slowly, there was no feedback confirming a selection had saved, and the equip button was hard to find, on a screen where players spend a lot of time and where building your team defines your success in the game.
Bring the team into the solution.
I invited all the key stakeholders, many of whom had been on the project for a long time, to a workshop where I ran through the survey results, themes and problem statements. Focusing on the key problem statement, a Crazy 8s exercise got everyone's ideas onto the table and gave us shared focus across the rest of the game. On a team with a Creative Director, Design Director, Art Director and a narrative writer, the workshop mattered as much for alignment as for the ideas.
Fix navigation with a structural decision.
To address the navigation problems we built the experience around a central dashboard, with tasks and flows extending out from it. Once players start a task they're locked into either finishing it or exiting back to the dashboard or previous page, which removed the wandering that the research had exposed.
Wireframe fast, then hand off.
I made lo-fi wireframes in Miro to work through each step of the agreed flows, then handed them to Marina, our UI Designer, who produced the initial designs in Adobe XD.
Test the structure before committing to it.
Working alongside Marina, we designed hi-fi screens and prototypes and tested them remotely with our audience using Maze. The majority of flows and the new structure tested well: players quickly got the hang of returning to the dashboard between tasks, and locking them into flows reduced their confusion. The create-a-team flow was the exception, so we iterated on it.
Move to Figma and build the system.
We switched to Figma partway through, as the better tool for collaboration and for building a design system. The system had two objectives: improving consistency across the interface, and speeding up the design process. Drawing on Andrew Couldwell's Laying the Foundations, it covered Foundations, Components and Patterns, built on design tokens, and got the name it deserved: 🍕 Pizza Juice. Engineering built it out as a React component library.
Document components so they get used properly.
We documented Pizza Juice in Figma, which made it easier to maintain. Every component covered the same ground: the component itself, its anatomy, its variants, its component properties, and usage guidance with dos and don'ts. Foundations were tokenised down to the colour ramp, with every colour and text pairing contrast-tested against AA and marked pass or fail, so accessibility was a documented property of the system rather than a later audit. The palette also included a skin tone range so players could modify their character's skin colour.
Teach the game to new players.
Players had told us they were confused about how to play, so a lot of focus went into NUX. Working with Kyle, our Art Director, and Harry, our narrative writer, I created an onboarding flow that walks players through the key elements of the game and shows them how to interact with the UI, delivered in-world through a guide character rather than as a manual, with a task list (get a character, create a team, start a delivery shift, attempt an ambush) and rewards for completion.
Bet on combat.
Improving the overall combat experience was a primary focus even though it wasn't highlighted in the survey, because we knew it would make a much bigger impact on the game moving forward. We created components specifically for combat, including a character control panel, CARDs, a music player and dialogue boxes, and worked closely with technical artists on a series of overlays and status effects.
Collaboration
We worked in two-week sprint cycles, opening with a kick-off and closing with a retrospective. Alongside the design work I co-managed projects and people, and I put real effort into handover: keeping a record in Jira and using a combination of written notes, annotated Figma files and Loom videos to create comprehensive handover notes, so a distributed engineering team of six could build without waiting on me to explain intent.
Beyond that, this was deeply cross-disciplinary. Marina took wireframes into UI, engineering built Pizza Juice in React as the system was designed, the Art Director and narrative writer co-created the onboarding so it taught the game in its own voice, and technical artists partnered on the combat VFX.
Outcomes & Impact
- Turned a screen-recorded survey across 11 tasks into a prioritised, evidence-backed design roadmap, with a problem statement for every task and one key statement that aligned the whole team.
- Validated the core structural fix before building on it: prototype testing in Maze confirmed the central-dashboard model reduced confusion, and flagged the one flow that needed rework.
- Delivered 🍕 Pizza Juice, a token-based design system with thousands of component varieties and states, documented in Figma and built into a React library by engineering, with AA contrast testing recorded against every colour pairing.
- Designed an in-world onboarding experience that carried the conceptual load of a genuinely novel game model, teaching play-to-earn mechanics through doing rather than reading.
- Rebuilt the combat experience, components, VFX and all, for where the game's core loop needed to go next rather than only what the survey asked for.
- Established a handover practice (Jira, annotated Figma, Loom walkthroughs) that let a distributed six-person engineering team build from the designs independently.
Reflection
The redesign never went live. The crypto market turned, industry attention swung towards AI, and in January 2023 Blockade Labs, formerly Blockade Games, pulled funding to focus on building the next generation of game development tools using AI. That was a hard one to sit with, because the work was strong and the community was real. The honest lesson is that we aimed for a complete reinvention when we could have shipped improvements continuously; the navigation and feedback fixes were validated early and could have reached players while the window was still open. Markets move faster than redesigns.
Key Learnings
- Ship early, ship incrementally. A validated improvement in players' hands beats a perfect redesign that never launches, especially in a market you don't control.
- Make research specific enough to act on. A problem statement per task turned a vague "the UX is bad" into a roadmap the whole team could get behind.
- A design system is a speed tool as much as a consistency tool. On a small design team supporting six engineers, it's the difference between designing screens and designing the product.
- Listen closely to the community, but look past the survey. The combat UI was the biggest swing and it came from product judgement, not a research finding.
- Handover is design work. Annotated files and recorded walkthroughs kept a distributed team moving without turning me into a bottleneck.
Related: Viperium
Testimonials
“I would put James on any problem that requires detailed thinking and systemic, organized design. Plus, he's just a likeable chill guy.”
Garrett Schultz
Creative Director & Art Curator
“James Newton lead the change in the way we designed products at Blockade Games.”
Kyle Chivers
Operations Officer at Blockade Games
“James excels at simplifying... complexities for users, with designs that both explain to and inspire the user.”
Benjamin Heidorn
CTO, Co-Founder at Blockade Games
“James is a practiced designer with a unique combination of skills and life experiences — a strong creative energy paired with a keen sense for aesthetic harmony. I would recommend James without hesitation.”
Adam Smith
CTO & Co-Founder at Similie
Let's chat, drop me an email or connect on LinkedIn
© 2026 James Newton. Product Design
92a6438 · 1 aug 2026 · colophon · design system