Building a Flexible Farming & Husbandry UI
I designed an immersive farming system for Pawborough, a feline-oriented RPG with 1000+ Kickstarter backers. The feature lets players grow crops and harvest over several days, and is playable both on desktop and mobile - and later reused for the husbandry system.
Challenges
- The farming system relied on future illustrations of crops, but no art existed yet.
- Some mechanics aren't visible — I had to make them easy to understand, without a bunch of text.
- New features were added after handoff so I had to fit them into already finalized layouts.
Constraints
- I was the only designer; balancing feedback, iteration, and documentation alone.
- The layout had to be flexible enough to also support a future husbandry system with the same structure but different content.
- The farming logic was already defined, I couldn’t change how it worked, only how it was presented.
Early explorations and layout trials
- Low-fi mockups to explore the placement of the crop art, action bar, soil quality and informational text.
- I tested both list-style and column-based formats, though the column decision came much later after several iterations.
Info through visual communication
There was a lot of information I had to rely to the users without overwhelming them, such as soil quality, growth progress, and crop type. I ended up transforming as much of it as possible into visuals.
Soil quality
To make it more immersive, I introduced soil textures to represent soil quality visually; dark and rich for healthy, dry and cracked for poor. This made it more like part of the farm environment than just a stat bar.
Growth Progress
This bar went through a few iterations to make it as intuitive as possible. Instead of using free icons, one of our artists illustrated each phase.
- The system needed to show several days of care and multiple harvests.
- To visualise the daily progress, I created a bar using size-based growth icons.
I also reworked the colors — early versions made it hard to tell what day you were on. A small arrow points to the current day.
First released version
We released a playable version for early feedback. Players enjoyed it, but a few issues surfaced:
- A key button was placed awkwardly and needed repositioning.
- Some wording led to misinterpretation.
- A few edge cases went unnoticed - like the UI making it seem like you could have higher than 110% quality/density
Turning crops into animals
The farm UI was almost completely done, and we wanted a similar system but for raising animals. I adjusted the visuals and logic to match the husbandry theme, which saved time and made the experience familiar for players.
- Soil quality was changed to grass density
- We got new icons for the progress bar and action buttons
- We added pen sizes, allowing users to upgrade the size in order to raise more animals at a time
Reflections, realities & what’s next
Takeaways
- Small decisions like icon sizing or soil color had a big impact on usability and storytelling.
- Late feature additions and scattered documentation slowed implementation.
- I stayed in close contact with developers to ensure the UI was implementable and clearly documented.
Next steps
- Test whether soil mechanics are easily understood without explanation and adjust accordingly.
Outcome
- An extensive farming system well received by testing users
- A husbandry system built on the same design
- The flexible layout made it easy to adapt and expand as new gameplay mechanics were introduced
