Christian Orkibi — An Unreal Fairytale

An Unreal Fairytale

client

Playside Studios

YEAR

2025

DISCIPLINEs

Visual Direction

UI Design & Implementation

Iconography

VFX

During my time at Playside Studios I was lucky enough to be part of a small senior strike team for just over a year, working on an Unreal Engine 5 demo of an idea developed in-house. This narrative focused game was based on adapting Grimm’s Fairytales and bringing them to life with visceral AAA quality action adventure exploration, morality and combat.

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The project was designed as a way to push the studio’s experience with cutting edge Unreal Engine 5.5 & 5.6 tools and to showcase the extremely high level of quality and polish we could deliver as a team. The demo was built to be playable on PC, Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X.

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As the only UI and Visual Designer on the team, I prototyped, designed, implemented and optimised all of the UI across the game using Unreal’s blueprint system, bringing it to life with materials and the Niagara particle system. I also developed the visual style for the branding, the opening titles and the pitch that was delivered to the biggest names in the industry.

One of the central themes of the demo was contrast. The tension between good and evil, light and dark, safety and danger. To emphasise this, the logo features broad swirling curves and sharp angled corners and edges. Forged from steel, it’s then bathed in the violet glow of the corrupted magic infesting the land.

The demo begins in-media res, so it was important to set the scene and establish our characters and our world. I created a short motion piece to introduce the demo to players, pulling from fantasy, baroque and medieval visual tropes. Below are both the concepts and the final piece, combining particles, typography and incredible work from our concept artists.

title sequence frame in the style of an old fairytale book

The game’s HUD is intended to focus on simplicity and style over clutter. Small visual cues pull focus to the edges of the screen when needed, but recede as narrative and fast paced combat take over. I worked with game designers on dense features with multiple varied states, such as healing via magical lantern energy, ability charges and player and enemy health bars. I also worked to ensure that rewarding moments of progression were celebrated effectively.

a design concept for the unreal fairytale hud

As a short demo, there was only a small amount of scope given to menu based interactivity. We focused on an aspirational skill tree, showcasing the rich visual style of our world and scope for further development. Skills were revealed as players bested fairytale villains. Several skills were unlocked across the demo using multiple currencies and navigating around the screen using a controller cursor revealed the backstory of our characters.

skill tree design in the style of old parchment

screen design for the unreal fairytale skill tree

The typography featured in the pitch material and the UI is pulled from fairytale literature. The iconography is minimal and clean, yet still evoked the baroque art nouveau themes of our game. In order to maintain the feel of visual polish, the icons were kept largely flat and subdued.

page from the unreal fairytale styleguide

Using Unreal Engine’s Niagara particle system and custom configurable materials, I created several visual effects and callouts to support combat legibility and key messaging in the UI.