Gabriel
Jacobi

Hollow Pact is the latest title from Studio Midhall. Launched on Kickstarter in 2025, it reached full funding in just 16 minutes. The game is semi-cooperative with a strong horror theme: one player controls a mysterious Beast, while the others take on the role of Scoundrels, navigating a dangerous city to deliver stolen cargo — before the Beast finds them.

Visual Identity, UI & Component Design

For this project, I was responsible for graphic design across all game components, collaborating closely with the illustrator, game designer and developers to shape the game's visual language.

This included cards (Deeds, Remnants, Curses, etc.), player boards, an iconography and typography system, and colour palettes and layout standards.

The goals for the design process were to balance:

1. Atmosphere & theme — supporting the horror tone through typography, colour, and texture
2. Clarity & usability — ensuring players could quickly parse information during tense gameplay

Rulebook Design

The graphic project culminated in the creation of a 50+ page Rulebook covering all game mechanics and scenarios. The Rulebook had two core design challenges:

• Teaching newcomers in a structured, approachable format
• Serving as an in-game reference guide for more experienced players

To support both use cases, the content was organised into digestible sections, introducing consistent hierarchy and integrating diagrams, examples, and component callouts. The rulebook went through multiple iterations, taking feedback from the designers and playtesters into account.

3D Renders & Trailer

Beyond the printed materials, 3D product renders were created and used for Kickstarter marketing, social media campaigns, and retail previews. Additional 3D animations were also used in the game trailer, which presented the core mechanics and highlighted the game's tone, world-building, and visual identity.

Studio Midhall needed a new digital playtesting platform that would allow playtesters to submit feedback after a play session of their board game. Their existing solution was focused on their previous game and was not flexible enough to accommodate new projects. Furthermore, it lacked key features, such as being able to edit or remove previous feedback.

The game designers required a system where they could track statistics across different game versions, view insights about the overall game, and check into feedback tied to specific components such as characters or mechanics.

The Challenge

To ensure the platform addressed both player and game designer needs, we worked closely with the developer and the game designers in workshops, mapping out:

• Which metrics were most important for evaluating the game
• What kind of feedback was missing or unclear in the previous platform
• Pain points in the existing playtesting workflow, both for players submitting feedback and designers reviewing it

These workshops helped align the team around shared goals and established a clear foundation for the product.

Users, Roles & Data Structure

Following the initial workshops, we defined the different user types and their responsibilities within the system: Playtesters, Game Designers, and Admins.

For each role, we outlined the core tasks they needed to complete and how the data should be structured, shaping both the information architecture and the user experience.

Game Designer Experience

For game designers, the platform focused on insight and flexibility. They needed to quickly understand how the game was performing while also being able to investigate specific details. The solution enabled designers to:

• View aggregated evaluation data across multiple sessions
• Inspect individual play sessions in detail
• Read qualitative comments from each tester

Playtester Experience

The playtester flow was designed to be as clear and effortless as possible, minimising friction so testers would be encouraged to add quality feedback. One playtester is responsible for creating a game session and inviting the other players. After the session, the flow guided them through:

• Entering objective data such as number of players, session length, and final result
• Providing subjective feedback based on the predefined evaluation metrics
• Adding feedback to specific components, if needed

The interface emphasised clarity and simplicity, allowing players to focus on their experience rather than the effort of filling out a survey.

Beast: The Roleplaying Game is a tabletop RPG adaptation designed to be fully compatible with the 2024 edition of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Led by designer Chris S. Sims, the project expands the core ruleset with a new playable class, over 30 subclasses, 40+ spells, 100+ monsters and more than seven titanic Beasts. It also introduces new mechanics such as Grudges and Corruption, as well as over 3 full-length adventures. The project was successfully funded on Kickstarter in November 2025.

Preview Guide

To support the Kickstarter campaign, a free 100+ page preview guide was released. This digital book presented the setting, new rules, spells, creatures, magic items, maps, and a complete introductory adventure.

3D Renders

High-quality 3D renders were produced to support the marketing strategy across multiple channels, including the Kickstarter campaign, influencer outreach and the project trailer. These assets helped communicate the visual identity of the world and contributed to the campaign's successful funding.

Studio Midhall's Shattered Isles, the expansion for the board game Beast, was successfully crowdfunded in 2023. One of the stretch goals promised during the campaign was a dedicated website where players could create their own Contracts, Beasts and Hunters, adding replayability to the game through community-driven content.

An initial version of the tool was released shortly after the campaign, but it only allowed the creation of Contracts. Although fully functional, the experience lacked usability, discoverability, and responsiveness. There was a need to rethink and scale this early build into a more polished creation platform, eventually named the Creator's Guild.

User Research, Information Architecture & Flows

To understand pain points and expectations, we asked members of the community who had been using the original Custom Contract tool about their experience. These conversations informed the new information architecture for the Studio Midhall website and defined how the Creator's Guild would integrate with player accounts and the main brand ecosystem. Establishing clear categories for Contracts, Beasts, and Hunters helped simplify navigation, while new features such as tagging, sorting and search addressed core usability gaps.

Wireframes, Look & Feel

With structure and features defined, we moved into wireframing for both desktop and mobile. The goal was to clarify hierarchy — what content mattered most — and to balance the familiarity that players had with the print material with a digital environment. For the visual identity, we drew inspiration from Studio Midhall's existing tone: dark fantasy, atmospheric, and immersive. Typography, colours, and image treatments were selected to feel cohesive with previous Beast materials, while still supporting a clean and functional creation interface.

Final Design

The final Creator's Guild allowed players to create not just Contracts, but also new Beasts and Hunters. It worked seamlessly across desktop and mobile and all existing user-created Contracts from the older system were successfully imported. Quality-of-life improvements transformed the experience: users could now tag creations, filter and sort results, manage translations, and generate print-friendly versions of their work.

Physical print support was also implemented, since many board gamers prefer playing with printed cards.

Bundle Offering

Both the previous version and the new Creator's Guild were a success. Thus, the best creations were bundled in a print version as one of the crowdfunding rewards.

Arjo is a medical device company based in Malmö focused on patient mobility — one of their products is a hospital bed for acute care.

VTE (Venous Thromboembolism) is the largest preventable cause of hospital deaths. While facilities and caregivers are aware of the risks and challenges, many lack the time and resources to implement optimal prevention methods. Arjo's Flowtron Active Compression System is a solution that offers a safe and convenient method of blood clot prevention, focusing on patient comfort.

The Arjo VTE Explorer was designed to offer sales personnel or potential buyers an easy and approachable way of learning about their offering. Users can learn about causes and dangers of VTE and manipulate all Arjo products in a 3D environment.

The Flowtron Active Compression System is a pump that inflates garments around different parts of the leg, helping blood circulation. Arjo wanted to emphasise the ease of use of the equipment — thus one of the central features was the possibility of interacting digitally with the device. By following the same steps as they would on the real machine, users can learn how easy and quick the Flowtron setup is.

All models were provided by the Arjo R&D team — when that was not the case, they were modelled based on their feedback. They were then all textured to be compatible with the three.js web engine.

The Cumulus project is a proof of concept showcasing the connectivity capabilities of the equipment and possible solution offerings from streaming data of the bed serial port to the cloud.

This allows for remote monitoring of the bed status — such as backrest angle, brake state or bed height — which enables the user to see if the bed is following a fall prevention protocol, a set of safety measures that prevents patients from falling or leaving the bed.

The end result are dashboards that assist nurses in ward monitoring, local administrators in equipment management, and Arjo employees in client administration.

Research involved discussing different use cases and users with the stakeholder, defining key user flows and setting design requirements.

Ward Monitoring

For the ward monitoring, the challenges were twofold:

• Giving personnel accurate and relevant information in a quick manner
• Displaying a variable amount of beds — wards could have from only six beds to hundreds, which directly affected the information density in a single screen

Other Dashboard Views

Other parts of the dashboard included user and location management, event logs, and mockups for future scenarios such as fleet management and diagnostics.

Released in 2022, the Superbolt NXT is the next version of multi-jackbolt tensioners — a type of nut designed for tightening large bolts, where the torque requirements are too high for conventional tools.

Nord-Lock Group needed to communicate the advantages of the new features for existing customers and increase awareness for potential new users in the EMEA market. Since the tensioner was only a prototype at the time, a high-fidelity 3D version was modelled and textured from scratch in Blender and Substance Painter:

Additional materials included a landing page, product animations, manuals and quick-start guides, technical guides, brochures, and social media communication — all built around a cohesive visual language developed for the product launch.

Bolted is a magazine published by Nord-Lock Group with the objective of sharing bolting knowledge and industry insights. The magazine was produced together with the engineering team, journalists, and the marketing department.

It is published twice a year in 10 different languages, including Chinese, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Swedish.

Some of the material can be quite technical. The illustrations and diagrams were done in close collaboration with the engineers, to ensure that all information is accurate.

Making the magazine is only one part of the process: during the year we are constantly publishing the content on social media. This includes advertising the magazine itself, as shown here.