Google Labs
•
2024
FX Arcade was a new business pitch to Google Labs — a vision for a social mobile gaming platform where GenAI tools lower the barrier to game creation for a generation of Gen Z and Gen Alpha players.
Google Labs wanted to do for game creation what TikTok did for video — make it effortless, expressive, and native to how Gen Z and Gen Alpha actually live. The goal: convert 20%+ of players into active creators. Platforms like Roblox proved young people want to build. GenAI could finally make it easy enough.
The design challenge was invisibility — tools powerful enough to produce real games, light enough that a 14-year-old picks them up without hesitation. Every interaction had to feel more like play than authorship.
Spark curiosity to explore dream spaces players can create together. GenAI is the toolkit that can unlock new genre.
Cultivate space for players and creators to show up as their authentic selves. GenAI is the paintbrush to show off play on their terms.
Unlock opportunities for fierce rivalries and cooperative problem solving. GenAI is the idea engine for new collaborative adventures.
Challenge ordinary social constructs and embrace the unconventional. GenAI is the creation companion that can inspire conversation.
The platform's core engagement loop centers on The Hall of Dreams — a daily rotating set of five games that players work through to earn stars and climb the leaderboard. Every game in the hall can be remixed by players, with GenAI tools unlocking progressively as their Creator Level increases.
I designed the full interaction arc: the home screen progression system, game launch states, in-game UI, score screens, remix triggers, and the Creator Level reward moments. Each element was designed to make the transition from player to creator feel earned and exciting — not technical.
Players earn stars by hitting notes in time. Weavers can remix the music by typing a prompt — generating entirely new note sequences and soundscapes in seconds.
Players race friends through pastel cloudscapes. At Creator Level 2, Weavers unlock advanced physics variables — friction, turn radius, acceleration — letting them reshape how the game feels to play.
One of the most important design challenges was making the creator progression system feel meaningful — not like a reward in a loyalty program, but like genuine growth.
When a player publishes their first game remix and earns enough stars, the platform serves them a Creator Level increase moment: a full-screen cinematic reward with a crystalline star animation and a concrete unlock — "New physics unlocked!" — that immediately changes what they can build.
FX Arcade was demanding not because the brief was complicated, but because it was almost completely open — we had to invent everything. The challenge I'm proudest of is visual coherence across wildly different aesthetics. Neon Jungle is dark and electric. Cloud Racer is soft and pastel. They live side-by-side in the same app yet both feel unmistakably like Elsewhere. That's a systems problem as much as a visual one.
We reached the finalist stage and weren't selected — the client needed a partner with game development capabilities, not a design agency. That's an honest outcome. The work remains one of the most complete product visions I've built, and it directly shaped how I think about GenAI as a creative tool, not just a productivity shortcut.
