Product Designer & Scrum Master
6 Designers
3 Full-Stack Developers
8 Weeks
Figma
Illustrator
Photoshop
Jira
Procreate
Daybreak is a multiplayer board game where players race to reach safety before a pursuing monster catches them. Each turn combines dice movement, strategic card play, and player sabotage, creating a tense and competitive experience.
The game ends when the last player standing reaches safety or when the ENTITY claims them all.
What I Contributed
For Daybreak, the design challenge was specific: how do you create a game that stays engaging across multiple rounds while balancing competition, randomness, and player control?
Players needed to feel both strategic and reactive. Decisions had to matter. Every round needed to feel different from the last.
We designed a card-based system that allows players to approach each round differently by combining strategy, randomness, and player interaction. Cards were divided into three distinct categories, each serving a unique role in the moment-to-moment experience.
Offensive
Used against other players to disrupt their progress and shift the balance of power.
Action
Help the player gain a direct advantage — movement boosts and copy mechanics.
Defensive
Stay in the deck and activate automatically — protection without spending points.
This system gave players the agency to outpace the monster, disrupt opponents, and adapt their strategy in real time — making each round genuinely unpredictable and worth replaying.
To begin the project, each team member independently developed their own game concept.
Instead of jumping into group brainstorming, this approach gave everyone space to explore ideas without being influenced by louder voices. Each concept was then presented to the team, and we voted on the direction we were most excited to pursue.
We initially moved forward with a selected concept but early in development we realized it was too complex for our timeline. I proposed simplifying the game while keeping the core storyline intact. As a team, we pivoted. This allowed us to stay true to the original vision while building something more focused and achievable.
Before designing anything, we ran a user survey to understand what makes games engaging, what frustrates players, and how people behave in multiplayer settings. The findings shaped every design decision that followed.
We analyzed existing multiplayer board and card games to understand where the market is, and where Daybreak could carve out a distinct experience.
No existing game combined a spatial board race, escalating threat mechanics, and a three-tier card system. Daybreak's strength is that it's easy to pick up — but rewards players who think ahead.
The first version of Daybreak was played on a table with printed cards, tokens, and handwritten tiles. This gave us immediate, cheap feedback before a single line of code was written.
Testing the prototype in person allowed us to evaluate how players interacted with the card system, whether the rules were easy to understand, and how the pacing of the game felt.
Three rounds of paper playtesting surfaced four critical balance issues before a single line of code was written.
Problem
Players who collected multiple mean cards could stack them on a single player, creating overwhelming and unavoidable penalties.
Problem
Certain movement cards let players win in half the expected time, making the ENTITY feel irrelevant.
Problem
Too many sabotage cards created an imbalance where players could be repeatedly pushed back, making the experience feel punishing and frustrating.
Problem
Players didn't understand when the ENTITY would escalate stages. The monster felt unpredictable in a frustrating, not exciting, way.
After paper prototyping, I moved into wireframing the two complex player interactions: the card deal flow (players pay card points to choose which card to play) and the steal flow (a multi-step interaction with randomized resolution).
Balancing a dark horror aesthetic with readable UI required careful visual hierarchy and interaction feedback.
A core mechanic of Daybreak is its card system. Cards function simultaneously as actions players can perform, abilities they can activate, and currency used to pay for those abilities.
This creates a strategic layer where players must decide whether to spend cards now or save them for future turns — the core tension of every round.
I designed the UI flows for picking up and playing cards. Players are limited to three actions per turn, and activating abilities requires spending other cards as currency.
The interface needed to clearly communicate which cards could be played, how many cards were required to activate each ability, and how many actions remained in the current turn.
The goal was to keep the system strategic but easy to understand during live gameplay.
We finalized all game assets, UI, and interaction flows, bringing the core systems into a cohesive design.
These were handed off to developers to implement into a fully playable multiplayer experience.
Trailer created by a teammate.
Daybreak taught me that designing a game and designing a product are more similar than they first appear. Both require you to understand what keeps people engaged — and both punish you immediately when you get it wrong.
Takeaway 01
Pivot early, not late.
Recognizing that our original concept was too ambitious and advocating for a simpler direction was the most impactful decision I made on this project.
Takeaway 02
Paper beats assumptions.
Two playtests with physical cards surfaced more balance problems than weeks of hypothetical design would have.
Takeaway 03
Balance is a systems problem.
The issues we found weren't wrong numbers, they were systems interacting badly. Good UX means thinking in systems, not features.
Takeaway 04
Facilitation is part of good design.
Keeping the team aligned, unblocked, and moving forward had a direct impact on the quality of the final product.
