Hexcape

Challenge

I joined Hexcape as a developer. Early in the project, the team's real gap turned out to be illustration and design — the same world had to carry across printed cards, app screens, AR scenes, and a 360-degree temple, and nobody had bandwidth to take it on. The challenge was internal: could I shift crafts mid-project, on a tight Academy timeline, without slowing a team of six down while I learned tools I'd never shipped with?

Process

1. 01Step

   Trading the keyboard for a stylus

   Moved most of my daily work into Procreate. I'd used it for personal pieces; this was the first time it had to hold up under team review, asset pipelines, and consistency across dozens of cards. I leaned on what I knew from writing code — naming, versioning, reusable building blocks — and applied it to brushes, palettes, and shape language so the world stayed coherent as it grew.

2. 02Step

   Learning 360 illustration in Photoshop

   The 360-degree temple was a new problem entirely. Procreate wasn't the right tool, so I picked up the parts of Photoshop I'd avoided — equirectangular projection, seam-safe composition, painting across a wrap. The first passes looked broken when you panned around them; by the third, it read as a real place.

3. 03Step

   One world across surfaces

   Cards on a table, AR on the phone, a 360 scene in a viewer, and UI on a screen all had to feel like the same game. I held shared palette and line-weight rules so the same goddess looked like the same goddess everywhere, and worked closely with the iOS engineers so handoff stayed direct — assets named, sized, and exported for the way the app actually consumed them.

4. 04Step

   Managing the shift

   The hardest part wasn't either craft on its own — it was holding both contexts at once without losing the team's pace. I treated the role-switch like a sprint: short feedback loops, daily check-ins, and being honest about what I could and couldn't deliver by the next review. The dev instinct of shipping small, often, and visibly turned out to translate cleanly into the design side.

Outcome

Hexcape shipped, was spotlighted by Apple at the 2022 Developer Academy graduation, and reached players through Indonesian press coverage. For me personally, it was the project that turned illustration and design from a side passion into a second discipline I now bring into every product I build.

Stack

• Procreate
• Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• Figma

Gallery

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