Hidden Acorn is a new game studio based in the San Francisco Bay Area building our first title: a competitive, PvP real-time strategy game launching across all major platforms. We're a small, ambitious team and we are looking for talented, passionate people who'll build it with us from the ground up.
About the Role
Hidden Acorn is looking for a UI/UX Designer and Implementer who sees the state of RTS interfaces not as a standard to meet, but as a problem worth solving. We're building our RTS in Unreal Engine 5 with a tablet-first, mobile-forward mindset, and the conventions the genre has relied on for thirty years weren't designed with that in mind. This is not an "implement the wireframes" role. You'll work directly with the founders and Creative Director to question whether the wireframe is the right idea in the first place, invent interaction patterns that don't exist yet, and then build them.
What You'll Do
- Own the end-to-end UI/UX process, from interaction concept through implementation in Unreal Engine 5 using UMG and CommonUI
- Design and prototype touch-first interfaces for core RTS actions, including unit selection, command issuance, camera control, and the command card, ensuring they feel native on a phone or tablet rather than like a shrunken desktop UI
- Identify and challenge inherited RTS conventions by questioning what information actually needs to be on screen, when, and why
- Build fast, throwaway prototypes to test interaction ideas before committing to full implementation
- Collaborate with engineers to understand what game state is available and when, and design UI that surfaces the right information at the right moment
- Define and maintain a UI component library and style system that the team can extend without creating inconsistency
- Run informal playtests, observe how people interact with what you've built, and iterate
What We're Looking For
- 2 to 3 years of UI/UX work with hands-on implementation experience; you design it and build it, not just hand it off
- At least one shipped mobile title or equivalent serious mobile UI work; you understand touch target sizes, thumb zones, gesture conflicts, and performance constraints at a practical level
- Proficient in Unreal Engine 5's UI stack including UMG and CommonUI, or a comparable real-time UI framework, with a willingness to go deep in UE5 if you're not already there
- A portfolio or track record that shows thinking, not just execution; we want to see cases where you challenged a brief, tried something unconventional, or identified that the stated problem was the wrong problem
- Strong communicator who can defend unconventional ideas to people with strong opinions and articulate why an interaction works without it becoming a debate about taste
Nice to Have