I BEE Xploring

In 2025 I did an internship at Birungi Studio: a startup game studio that aims to make casual mobile games for social impact. I worked on their first project: I BEE Xploring. It's an endless runner about an explorer bee looking for a better home for their hive. My roles on this project were: 2D (concept) Art Lead, UI/UX Designer, Illustrator and Graphic Designer.

Birungi Studio

Illustration & Graphic Design

As part of a small startup team, I wore many hats during my time at Birungi. I did have some experience working as an illustrator before. During my internship I got to combine my illustration skills with graphic design and marketing tasks to broaden my skillset. I worked on developing a visual identity to be used in marketing, making promotional materials for events (banners, posters, stickers, business cards and shirts for INDIGO and Gamescom) and building a pitch deck that we used to talk to investors.

I made a design kit, consisting of logo's, textures, fonts and a layered illustration that can be taken apart and rearranged to fit different screen sizes and print formats.

UI/UX Design

I wanted to learn more about UI and UX Design and had a great opportunity to do so by redesigning the User Interface of the game. My team was working on polishing a prototype that had placeholders for all the UI assets and was missing some screens. I started by making a flowchart to get clarity on all the screens and pop ups that had to be designed and their relations to each other. After that I made wireframes and mockups that I sent to the designers for feedback. After finalizing a design I made game-ready 2D assets in Figma.

Character Concept Art

As I was developing the menus I also got to do some concepts for characters that you encounter in the hive.

Art Direction

The goal of our team was to polish the prototype that the previous team made and prepare it for a beta test launch on the appstore. We started out by exploring new directions for the art of the game through concept art and moodboards.

Color palette

The first thing we focused on was explorations for a new color palette.

Shape Language

I made some rough sketches to experiment with the shape language.

Types of Assets

As I was experimenting with the shape language, I realized it would probably be a good idea to define the types of assets that would appear in the levels, as we might want to vary the shape language slightly to make them visually distinct. This became a useful guide for the 3D artists and game designers working on the first level. After this I made some concept art for different types of assets for the park biome.

Comparison

To illustrate the context of this visual development work: a comparison between the rough prototype and the beta playtest version our team worked on. Credits to the 3D team for all the assets!