Concept
Minimising HUD clutter for cosy exploration players
I designed a Switch-style game UI concept that uses an in-world travel journal to help players find goals, collect discoveries, and track progress without relying on persistent minimaps or quest-heavy HUD patterns.
Context
Background
Along the Way is a self-initiated UI/UX concept for a cosy exploration game set in a rural world of quiet paths, hidden locations, and red-ink stamps.
It was imagined as a B2C console game for players who enjoy slower pacing, gentle goals, collection, and low-pressure discovery. I led the UI concept, journal interaction model, stamp mechanic, visual language, and presentation. The 3D environment imagery was externally sourced; the interface system and product logic were my own work.
Challenge
Exploration games need to give players direction, but too much interface can pull attention away from the world itself. For this concept, a conventional HUD risked making a calm journey feel like a checklist of markers, prompts, and progress states. I used the journal as the central product system, giving players a place to check deeper navigation and progress information while keeping moment-to-moment exploration visually quiet.
Research
I reviewed cosy exploration and adventure games to understand how they balance maps, goals, collectables, and discovery feedback without making the experience feel pressured. I then tested 5 static screens and a lightweight click-through prototype with 6 players who enjoy exploration games.
Players understood the journal as a strong emotional device, but the first pass needed clearer differences between destinations, optional discoveries, and completed places.
Highlights
Helping players pursue goals without creating checklist pressure
Slow exploration still needs structure, but too many prompts can turn the world into a task list. I shaped the loop around choosing a destination, travelling with light guidance, discovering a place, receiving a stamp, and deciding what to pursue next.
This created soft completion: enough motivation to keep moving, without pushing players into constant optimisation.
Keeping guidance subtle but easy to recover
The world needed to stay visually calm, but players still needed confidence about where to go next. I used restrained red cues for lightweight direction, with the journal acting as the fallback source of truth. The trade-off was presence versus clarity: the UI should stay quiet, but progress cannot feel like guesswork.
Helping players check direction without following a minimap
A persistent minimap would have solved orientation, but it would also have kept the player’s attention on the interface. I replaced it with a journal check: a deliberate moment to review the next destination before returning to the world.
Making completion states easier to understand
The first journal pass made destinations, discoveries, and completed places feel too similar. I clarified the hierarchy between unstamped destinations, stamped locations, and optional discoveries so players could read progress at a glance.
Giving progress emotional value through stamps
The progress system needed to feel tied to travel, not like a detached achievement layer. I used red-ink stamps to mark discovered destinations as places the player had personally visited.
Impact
Results
This was a self-initiated concept, so the strongest evidence is prototype feedback rather than live product metrics. In a 6-person concept test, all participants understood that the journal combined navigation and progress, 5 of 6 identified stamps as completed destinations, and 4 of 6 said the system felt more personal than a standard HUD. The work brought navigation, discovery, collection, and progress into one in-world UI system instead of spreading them across persistent HUD layers.
Reflection
The project clarified that minimal UI only works when players still know what to do next. The key design decision was not simply removing interface, but deciding where information belonged: in the world, in the journal, or in a short feedback moment.
If I continued the concept, I would test the full destination loop, validate handheld and TV readability, and define how the journal scales across more locations, stamps, discoveries, and revisits.
Summary
The meaningful problem in Along the Way was balancing direction with presence. The journal gave navigation, progress, and discovery a shared place inside the game world, reducing the need for persistent HUD patterns. The result is a focused game UI concept built around calm guidance, emotional memory, and low-pressure completion.