Learning to build on a new blockchain platform is hard. The documentation is dense, the concepts are abstract, and most developer tutorials feel like reading a technical manual. Elemental Battles took a different approach — a fully playable card game that teaches developers how to build on EOSIO through eight interactive lessons, taking them from writing their first smart contract all the way to front-end development and live blockchain data.
Role & Team
I collaborated with marketing, product, and development teams to deliver the project in a single month. My focus was on the user experience and visual direction — making sure the learning objectives, gameplay mechanics, and visual system all pulled in the same direction.
Project Goal
Make EOSIO development accessible to developers who had never touched blockchain before. The game needed to be genuinely engaging — not just a gimmick — so that users would stick with it through all eight lessons and actually absorb the concepts being taught.
Design & Visual Direction
The research phase involved paper prototyping and competitive analysis of online card games to understand what made engagement mechanics work. Insights from that work shaped both the UX and the visual direction — a fantasy-themed system built around three elemental forces (Wood, Fire, Water) that drew inspiration from games like Hearthstone. This structure did two things well: it created clear visual progression that reinforced learning milestones, and it gave the whole experience a sense of narrative that kept players invested beyond just completing lessons. The UI was designed to feel like a game first and a tutorial second.
Project Learnings
One month. Eight lessons. A complete game. The compressed timeline forced rapid prioritisation and close cross-functional collaboration — there was no time to revisit decisions that didn't work. Seeing users actually enjoy the experience at the end made it worth every late night. This project remains one of the clearest examples in my work of how strong design can make something genuinely difficult feel approachable.