NFL Matchups

Mobile sports gaming in 2012 was unsettled territory. Japanese free-to-play mechanics were being translated for Western audiences for the first time, and nobody had convincingly answered the question of whether sports fans would embrace the collect-and-battle card game loop. NFL Matchups was DeNA Vancouver's attempt to answer it definitively.

The core concept replaced the fantasy staples of card battlers with real NFL athletes. Hundreds of active players alongside retired legends needed to feel like genuine collectibles, each with their own identity, rarity tier, and statistical weight. The card design system had to make Tom Brady and Adrian Peterson feel as compelling to collect as any legendary game character.

The more unusual challenge was the live data layer. NFL Matchups was one of the first mobile games to dynamically pull real-world performance statistics into its gameplay loop. Every Tuesday, the game updated player card values based on the prior weekend's actual NFL results. A wide receiver with a three-touchdown game would receive a statistical buff on their card the following week. Designing a deck management system, trading interface, and player stats UI that could handle fluid, weekly value changes driven by external data feeds without confusing the player was genuinely new territory.

As the first Art Lead hired at DeNA Vancouver, I joined as one of the studio's founding 15 employees and was responsible for establishing the visual and design foundation of the game from concept through to market release.

My work covered the initial core design, layout, and structure of the full interface, art direction and look and feel across all UI systems, and early animation and prototype work used to align the team and get direction approved before production scaled. Once the blueprint was in place, I led a team of approximately 15 in-house artists to execute the full card library, with designs structured across rarity tiers, teams, player types, and statistical categories.

I also worked directly with both the NFL and NFL Players Inc. throughout the project to ensure all treatments of their intellectual property were correctly licensed and compliant, from team logos and stadium art through to individual athlete likenesses across more than a thousand cards.

A core design challenge was making the tactical layer feel genuinely meaningful without overwhelming the player. The formation system let coaches set offensive and defensive schemes before kickoff, with the depth chart allowing fine-grained control over which players lined up where. At halftime, the interface presented the first-half result and gave players the opportunity to adjust their formation and spend energy to counter their opponent's strategy. These decisions had real consequences, which required a UI that surfaced complex information clearly under time pressure.

Beyond the in-game UI, the role extended to marketing and promotional materials used to communicate game mechanics to new players and drive engagement around key events like the weekly league cycle and in-app pack releases.

The wireframes below represent the early lo-fi UX documentation produced before the visual design layer was applied. These blueprints mapped out core interaction patterns, navigation flows, and screen logic across key systems including formation selection, training, and depth chart management.