Released on Steam
Dryad
A 2D island-building adventure on Steam. I rebuilt its UI from the ground up.
- 20+screens rebuilt
- Jul 2026released on Steam
Dryad is a 2D island-building adventure set on a floating island, released on Steam in July 2026.
The problem
Dryad’s original UI had become hard to maintain, and it was missing two things a game UI really wants: it had no way to animate, and no support for rich text. The team brought me in part-time to replace it.
Rebuilding it from the ground up
I rebuilt the UI from scratch in Gum, written in plain C# on MonoGame. That came to more than 20 screens, and every one of them scales to any window size, is easy to extend, and can finally animate, like the tabs in the clips on this page.
To put real game state on those screens, I also built the data layer that connects the game’s data to them.
Rich text, from scratch
With no rich text support to build on, I wrote my own rich text system in plain C#, so a single line of text can mix colors and styles. It was one of the most fun parts of the project.
Beyond the UI
Along the way I implemented gameplay features too, including systems built around the game’s relics.
