The Kingdoms expansion for Total War: Medieval II is considered one of the most content-rich and polished expansions in the Total War series. Since these campaigns needed to be accessed from the same app as the Grand Campaign, a campaign launcher was required, allowing players to view details of each campaign and select the one they wished to play. For players who had not yet purchased Kingdoms, the launcher also needed to function as an upsell surface.

The initial brief proposed presenting the DLC as a single item next to the Grand Campaign. I felt that, for players who did not own the DLC, this could come across as an intrusive in-game ad. My redesign focused on the campaign selection aspect instead.

For players who did not own the Kingdoms DLC, the same layout acted seamlessly as an upsell to browse the content that could be purchased.

As part of the UI revamping for the mobile version, we created over 2000 unique character portraits, of which you can find a small sample below:

We started by taking the original game’s portraits and classifying the different components (faces, clothes, hairstyles, hats, etc.) used for each character type. This gave us a list of over 300 different components that we hand-painted in high resolution. I implemented the system that grabbed the different components for each character type and put them together in a unique combination for each character.

Special character types such as Generals needed “old age” and “passed away” portrait variations. This required the system to remember the component combination used for each character, swap the necessary components (wrinkled skin, white hair or statue versions) and export the portrait with the appropriate identifier.