TIEBREAK+: Official Game of the ATP and WTA

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Big Ant Studios // 2023-24

Boasting over 140 licensed professional tennis athletes and 90 official tournaments, TIEBREAK+ delivers the most authentic tennis simulation experience

Officially released in August 2024, TIEBREAK+ is a tennis simulation video game developed by Big Ant Studios. An immersive simulation experience into the world of professional tennis, TIEBREAK+ brings a exciting, competition-focused user experience to consoles around the world.

Working in a small tight-knit team, we crafted comprehensible user flows and dynamic user interfaces that accurately represents the world of professional tennis and its licensed content.

Approach

From the project’s initial ideation to its post-release updates, I worked closely with the UI Artist to deliver user flows, interfaces and prototypes. Regularly consulting directors, producers and game designers, we were responsible for transforming ideas and concepts into designs that were user-friendly and digestible whilst also being eye-catching and faithful to licensed content.

With the opportunity to hold regular focus group sessions with tennis and video game enthusiasts, we were able to receive a consistent source of feedback via research and user testing, ensuring interfaces and user flows were optimally designed for those who would play TIEBREAK+.

Over the course of a year of production, I helped design:

Main menu interaction and navigation with a bespoke tile UI system
Unique themes, interfaces and UI assets for 6 licensed major competitions and 3 licensed pro-focused challenge modes
Dynamic loading screens that showcase over 140 licensed players
Player Career mode - a comprehensible tennis career simulation, curating various screens and game mechanics into a clear and immersive user experience
A revamped clothing selection screen for created players - showcasing numerous licensed brand apparel to mix-and-match onto on-court outfits

In addition, as a contributor who wore many hats for this project, I also helped:

Write front-end code that accurately bring our mockups to life in-game (XAML implemented via Noesis)
Create style dictionaries for UI programmers that allow dynamic screens to actively change themes on-demand
Contribute to game design decisions within cross-functional teams, particularly with Player Career mode and its various mechanics and flows

Game Intro Screen + Main Menu: Created via Figma, After Effects and XAML (Noesis)

Challenges

As TIEBREAK+ is an international game supporting 12 languages, one of the challenges I faced was localisation. These languages varied in word lengths and writing systems, and thus typography was often faced with certain stylistic restrictions. I quickly learnt how to balance the variation in strings with visual aesthetics, ensuring localised game experiences were inclusively accounted for.

As a project built from multiple major production sprints before and after launch, ad-hoc tasks were frequently undertaken within very quick timeframes. User flows and their interfaces were often researched, tested, completed and handed-off in very quick succession. This intense workflow spanning 12 months allowed me to quickly learn how to deliver to the needs and expectations from myself, collaborators and stakeholders.

Kelvin Nguyen