Key Art / Game Assets
Creative leadership, brand strategy, and multidisciplinary design for the world's number one mobile music game.
music game globally
The Tour Pass served as Beatstar’s central monthly progression and monetisation system. However, early versions felt too conceptual and lacked cohesive visuals, making it difficult to reinforce the game's core brand identity. The challenge was to transform these recurring releases into distinct, instantly recognisable global brand ecosystem.
I established a scalable visual framework for the monthly Tour Pass key art, shifting the creative direction to position the iconic Beatstar tile as the "main character" of every campaign. This strategic shift instantly reinforced brand identity at a glance. I directed and executed the creative theme for each season, ensuring the visual assets flawlessly adapted across in game menus, marketing pipelines, and promotional materials to serve as a high impact first point of contact for players.
This visual overhaul turned the Tour Pass into a premium marketing engine. The elevated, brand first key art became the definitive creative standard used to secure high profile App Store and Google Play global featuring. By bridging craft with platform compliance, these assets significantly heightened player engagement, driving adoption of the premium reward tracks and directly contributing to the game's $200m+ lifetime revenue.
The introduction of Deluxe Mode represented Beatstar’s most significant endgame feature expansion; a high stakes, high skill gameplay tier designed to re-engage max level players and drive long term premium monetisation. The creative challenge was to establish a prestigious, standalone sub-brand identity that instantly communicated peak exclusivity, while ensuring it sat naturally within the existing core game interface.
I engineered a premium visual identity system from the ground up, starting with a geometric Deluxe brand mark. Blending 2D graphic design with 3D modelling, I translated this identity into a rich ecosystem of game assets. These included bespoke medals, cards, and a high fidelity 3D music crate. The design language leaned heavily into deep, obsidian textures paired with rich gold, intentionally mirroring the elite nature of the gameplay.
The Deluxe Mode identity became a massive visual hook for the community, generating intense organic hype across player forums and social channels upon reveal. The design language successfully drove massive player adoption of the new mode, motivating long term users to re-engage with higher tier monetisation loops. The assets seamlessly scaled across product UI and global marketing campaigns, solidifying Deluxe Mode as the absolute pinnacle experience within the world's number one music game.
Rank badges were a foundational element of Beatstar’s player progression and social status system. However, as the game’s live-ops scaled, the lack of a formalised design system meant newly introduced milestones began to visually blur into earlier tiers. This dilution compromised the player's sense of achievement that threatened to stall long term engagement as the progression curve expanded.
I re-engineered the architecture entirely, conceptualising and executing a modular badge system defined by strict logic of form and colour theory to convey hierarchy. To convert this into a scalable pipeline, I collaborated closely with the dev team to build a bespoke internal tool. This tool empowered anyone in the studio to dynamically generate perfectly compliant, brand accurate badges on demand, completely removing the design bottleneck for subsequent live ops content cycles.
The refreshed visual design gave players a clear, prestigious goal to strive for, which significantly boosted long-term retention and engagement metrics. Furthermore, by developing the internal automation tool, we drastically minimised production overheads, saving studio design hours and allowing the creative team to focus on higher value product and marketing assets.
Other Projects
