MENU
GENOPETS
YEAR
2022 - 2024
ROLES
Product Designer
Product Lead
PROJECT SCOPE
Product Design
UX/UI Systems
Creative Frontend
Design Leadership
DESIGN TOOLS
Figma
Spline
After Effects
TECH STACK
React
Next.js
Three.js
WebGL
GLSL
GSAP
OVERVIEW
A game economy you can hold.
Genopets is a move-to-earn game where your pet, your items, and your progress are assets you actually own. Over almost three years I led UX across web and mobile and owned three of its hardest surfaces: the player-to-player marketplace, the 3D minting experience, and staking. At its peak the game reached a million players, with over $100M staked through it. This case study goes deep on the marketplace, the surface that forced the sharpest decisions.
THE MARKETPLACE
The world’s first player-to-player item marketplace.
The pitch was simple to say: let players trade in-game items directly with each other, so value moves with the item the way it does in real life. No game had shipped it before. The hard part was underneath, in the information. Hundreds of item types, each with its own dense data, sitting on a rigid backend structure I had to design around. Everything below is how I made that navigable at a glance.
THE STRUCTURE
Four levels deep, flattened to two.
Some items nested four levels down. Following that literally would have buried players in clicks. I mapped every category and made the call to flatten navigation to two layers: pick an item type, then the item, with tabs to move between types. It holds every category cleanly and reads instantly. It also set up the next problem, because collapsing the hierarchy meant each item tile suddenly had to carry a lot more.
THE ITEM TILE
Only what earns its place.
With the hierarchy flat, the tile had to do the work, and the backend gave me little room and a lot of data. So I decided what mattered and cut the rest. The tile leads with the item image for instant recognition, sets the name at a size you cannot miss, and uses its corners for the two things players actually act on: what the item is and how many are on the market. Everything else waits until you open it.
THE RESULT
Any item, two clicks away.
Tabs take you to a category, the tile tells you the rest, and a sprawl of item types collapses into something you move through fast. I shipped this as a deliberate first version. Knowing what to cut to get a feature live, and how to sequence what comes next, search, filters, sort, is as much of the job in a startup as the interface itself. Those next versions were already drawn.
REFLECTION
The job was translation.
Genopets was three years of designing where games, finance, and crypto overlap, almost always under real shipping pressure. It taught me that in a domain that intimidating, the designer’s job is translation: turning systems people find scary into something they can trust and enjoy, and knowing what to ship now versus what to earn over the next iteration.