Gero Cordaro Designer · Developer · Problem-solver

Before designing the Codex in Photoshop, I wireframed every screen in Excalidraw and linked them together to plan how a player would flow between factions, menus, and subcategories. The structure I sketched here is the one that shipped.

The Codex background started as a flat grey canvas. A grunge texture gave it a worn, industrial surface, a dotted layer set to multiply added a digital feel, then exposure adjustments and a blue colour filter pushed it toward the cold, futuristic tone the whole interface sits on, with abstract layers on top for depth.

Every Chain icon was built up in stages: a traced diamond base with a darkened marble texture and bevel for depth, a second inset copy layered behind it, a numeral filled with a crackling lava mask, then chains wrapped over the top with rusty metal textures and glow passes.

Setting the UI canvas to Screen Space Camera meant the whole interface could be hit by Unity's Global Volume post-processing: bloom, vignette, chromatic aberration, and a subtle lens distortion. The same screen went from a flat menu to something that feels viewed through an actual device, and it changed the atmosphere of the entire Codex.

Feedback flagged that the blue cursor was disappearing into the blue-heavy interface. I switched it to white, then realised the navbar had the same problem and inverted its colour logic: selected items in white, inactive in blue. A small change that instantly made the whole interface easier to read.

The world map began in Wonderdraft, then every province was manually cut out into its own asset with matching glow outlines. In Unity, each region got its own polygon collider and a script handling hover, selection, glow, and animation states, with the selected province pushed to the top of the render order so its highlight is never hidden behind a neighbouring region.

The first standalone build exposed frame drops the editor had hidden: scene-wide object searches firing on every map click and settings open. I replaced them with cached lookups that reset on scene load, plus a warm-up script that initialises the map's animators and audio before the first click, so the first interaction is as smooth as the hundredth.

Bloom alone couldn't give Helion its halo: bloom is screen-space, so it favoured the closer planet and left the star looking tight. I wrote a custom shader for the core and corona, then added a large billboard glow quad behind the sun with an additive radial gradient. Helion got its huge warm halo in real 3D space, without contaminating the planet's lighting.