High On Life 2
An intergalactic conspiracy threatens the fate of humanity! Team up with a wide cast of talking alien guns as you shoot, stab, and skate your way through the exotic locales to take down the bad guys and save your favorite species (humans)!
High on Life 2 is the eagerly awaited sequel to Squanch Games’ acclaimed (and hilarious!) sci-fi first person shooter.
We worked as part of the lovely team at Squanch Games to update the look of High on Life’s UI for its sequel, collaborating closely throughout our engagement.
During the project, we worked closely with the team to refine the visual style and iconography, created concepts for the UI screens and implemented them in Unreal Engine 5.
Brief
A strong metaphor is fuel for UI direction. It gives you rules to play by, a lens to design through and a clear bridge between the game’s universe and the player’s eyeballs.
In High on Life, it’s the Suit-O OS running inside the player’s suit, with the HUD projected directly onto the helmet visor.
For High on Life 2, Suit-O gets a proper glow-up. Squanch Games’ Art Director, Mikey Spano, set the design direction, pushing the suit OS into sleeker territory while keeping that chaotic alien charm intact. Our job was to follow that vision and ensure every element felt like it was powered by the suit itself, not stuck on top of the gameplay.
HUD Design
With the concept locked in, we took care to follow the game’s visual direction and make sure every design fit into the Suit-O OS design style.
We explored colour palettes, shape language and typography, presenting multiple routes to help the team hone in on the exact flavour of chaos they wanted.
We prototyped HUD elements like the reticle and secondary fire widget in motion to test the functionality, the goal was to make them feel reactive and unmistakably part of the suit’s system.
Some features demanded an expanded slice of the design language, like the Murderboard and Murder Mystery widgets. For these, we created moodboards to explore how far we could crank up the absurdity and fun while staying within Suit-O’s OS framework.
SECONDARY FIRE WIDGET - Showing the ‘Ready’ state and when Bounty Juice is used.
MURDER MYSTERY - We worked with Jake Sones to create a ‘Cluedo’ meets Clippy style widget for the Murder Mystery mission.
WEAPON WHEEL
MURDERCON - We looked at lazer tag, DDR and 90s mobile blinkies to create the chaotic feel for the Murderboard and Murdercon toasts.
YOM YOM NAVIGATION - Referencing crappy old TomTom UI from the 00s, our favourite type of “bad” design!
RETICLES - Motion design tests for various character reticles and states.
EVEN MORE ASSETS - Just a small selection of panels, buttons, bars and additional widgets created.
Menus
From there, we took UI language across the menus, shaping screens like Inventory and Settings into fully fledged extensions of Suit-O’s OS.
These weren’t treated as utility pages but as living parts of the system, with motion, colour coding and customised headers so each inventory page had its own theme and visual interest.
INVENTORY
PAUSE MENU AND SETTINGS
Iconography
The goal for the game’s iconography was to evolve the previous style into the new Suit-O OS, while keeping it instantly readable at a glance.
As we created icons, we looked for opportunities to sneak in personality. The forms stay clear and functional but there is a wink in the details. Small references, in jokes and a touch of irreverence give the icons that distinctly High on Life flavour without compromising clarity.
JEPPY ICONS
MAP ICONS
GUN UPGRADE ICONS
Implementation & Engineering
For the final layer of polish, we leaned into post process effects such as subtle fish eye curvature, chromatic aberration and movement parallax gave the UI that projected on the visor feeling. The result feels embedded in the suit, not pasted over the action.
Under the hood, we made full use of master UI materials, building customised instances with channel packed textures to drive the visuals. This kept everything visually consistent across widgets while making global tweaks fast and painless. One smart change could ripple cleanly across the entire system.
On the engineering side, we paired design intent with technical precision. Using Unreal’s Blueprints, we implemented logic, animation and custom behaviours, ensuring they behaved exactly as designed. The goal was simple: keep the visual personality intact while making the system robust, responsive and production ready.
High on Life 2 was a brilliant opportunity for Dead Nice to deliver end-to-end UI + UX design, from visual exploration and motion prototyping to UI engineering and Unreal implementation. Working closely with Squanch Games, we helped to evolve Suit-O’s OS into a cohesive, characterful system that seamlessly blends strong visual design and robust technical execution.
As a specialist game UI + UX design and engineering studio, Dead Nice combines research-driven design thinking, bold visual direction and deep Unreal Engine expertise to create interfaces that feel native to a game’s world. Whether it’s HUD design, menu systems, iconography or full UI implementation, we build player-first experiences that are as functional as they are unforgettable.