Hatch

Hatch was a cloud-based social gaming platform built around instant access to quality mobile games, with live play, sharing, and multiplayer streaming built in. No downloads, no in-app purchases, no friction between the player and the game. I led visual, UI, and UX design as Art Director during the early formation and launch period, working across the product, the brand, the marketing presence, and the original games being built for the platform.

The design principle was Spotify for games. A premium, curated platform where quality games — from reputable studio releases to indie gems — were one tap away, where you could start and stop any time, share moments with friends, and stream multiplayer sessions with people who originally hadn’t designed their game for that. The aim was to make the platform feel less like an app store and more like a service you settle into.

That shaped the UI direction. The interface had to feel premium, calm, and unmistakably playful — closer to a media platform than a game launcher. Browsing had to feel like discovery, not shopping. Game tiles, transitions, the social layer, and the “live play” features all had to read as part of the same experience rather than separate product surfaces stitched together.

I also helped initiate the Hatch Originals program. These were games designed from the start to use the platform’s specific strengths — instant play, frictionless sharing, multiplayer streaming, the ability to drop in and out. I art directed several of them and helped set the creative direction for what an Originals game should feel like inside the platform context.

Hatch was genuinely ahead of its time. The technology — streaming games and connecting players across their own devices — is roughly what mainstream cloud gaming launched five to seven years later. Working at the front of that wave shaped how I think about product, brand, and content as a single system rather than three separate disciplines.