CropBytes
CropBytes set out to do something genuinely strange: turn the real mechanics of crypto trading - exchange, wallets, currency, volatility - into a farmland you’d actually want to play in. Living on the Metaverse, CropBytes Land let users farm, trade, and earn real crypto value through gameplay, and my job was to design the UX and UI that made a system this financially real feel this approachable, without losing an ounce of what made it a game.
Services
UX/UI Design · Design Systems · Web Design
Employer
Freelance
CropBytes wasn’t a game skinned to look like crypto - it was crypto, running underneath a farmland. Real exchange mechanics, real wallets, real currency, all sitting beneath a visual world designed to be played, not studied. The two things pull against each other by nature: crypto trading is dense, jargon-heavy, and unforgiving of mistakes; games are supposed to feel light, intuitive, forgiving enough to explore.
That meant the UX and UI couldn’t just decorate the crypto mechanics - they had to carry the entire weight of making them legible.
The challenge compounded across surfaces. A player needed to move fluidly between the game itself and their wallet, between “money mode” and “game mode,” without ever losing track of which one they were in - a distinction with real financial consequences if it got blurry.
We started where the risk was highest: mapping the full user journey from gameplay through to the wallet. That map became the backbone of the entire design process - it surfaced every feature and function on every page before a single screen got styled, and as the UX matured, we layered in the smaller interactions that made the journey feel alive rather than mechanical.
We built a playful environment around neon crypto colors, threaded consistently through the entire brand, so that a player always knew - at a glance, without reading a label - whether they were deep in gameplay or standing in the trading page dealing with real currency.
That distinction became a core design system in itself. Game assets were designed as exchangeable game cards, with a clear color shift marking the transition from game mode to money mode - turning a potentially confusing financial boundary into something a player could feel instinctively. Underneath it all, we built a library of unique, reusable components in Figma, which meant standing up a genuine design system for CropBytes was fast rather than a slog, and kept the game’s visual language consistent as new features shipped.
The experience didn’t stop at the game client. We extended CropBytes Land into a fully responsive website - continuing the same visual world across every device, while surfacing features that made more sense living outside the game entirely.
CropBytes turned a genuinely hard design problem - real crypto mechanics inside a game - into an experience where the complexity never had to be the player’s problem to solve. The color-coded shift between game mode and money mode meant financial clarity became a visual instinct rather than something a player had to consciously track.
New features, new cards, new pages could all be built from the same consistent system rather than reinvented from scratch.
By extending the experience into a responsive website, CropBytes Land stopped being confined to the game client - it became a world players could step into from anywhere, with the same playful, neon-lit identity carrying through every surface they touched.