Project
Mechanisoul

Main role
Creative Director/UI Designer

Date
August 2025 - Development Paused December 2025

Mechanisoul is a hack and slash/souls-like game. Humans have been pushed to the brink of extinction by a robot group: HAVOC. As a last stitch effort humanity hacks into one of the combat robots and gives them emotions to fight on their side, this is Talos. Talos must ascend up a tower and defeat HAVOC in order to save humanity.

Initial Design

This design has the different emotions having differently themed buffs for the player and from leveling up adjacent emotions, players would unlock combos that would grant other buffs. This was a good base to work off of, but the system needed more refinement and other changes to abilities also came into account. 

Prototype

Through an iterative design process, we landed on having different upgrades for Melee, Range, and Dash abilities. 

This design splits up the trees into tabs, one for each category, and for each emotion there's a base ability, and 2 upgrades to the base ability. On the right there's a panel that shows the emotion upgrade and a description of what it does. The finalized version will have icons for all the different upgrades as well as in engine post processing effects. 

The combos have been changed to synergies, when certain upgrades are unlocked the player gains access to a synergy ability. They will be hidden from the player and the player will end up unlocking them throughout a playthrough. 

This is functionally similar to the vertical slice version, but not aesthetically.

Vertical Slice

The design that was in game before development stopped.

Uses a color scheme similar to windows command line in order to lean into the robotic aesthetic of the game. Actual icons were made by one of our talented 2D artists that leaned into the comic style of the game.

Each type of upgrade has its own shape in order to make the synergies easier to categorize. Synergies are unlocked when upgrading a certain combination of upgrades that are only shown once the player happens to stumble into them. We chose this structure to give the game replayability and a unique progression system.

There are ways I would like to further flesh out the UI if development resumes.