Game UI/UX design cost: screens, HUD and budget

The short answer

UI and UX design for a hyper-casual game with 5 to 8 screens costs about $1,500 to $5,000. A casual or mid-core mobile game with 20 to 40 screens, a HUD, a shop and icons costs about $8,000 to $25,000. A complex RPG, strategy or live-service game with 60 or more screens costs $30,000 to $80,000 or more. The number of screens, and how late they change, decide the bill.

UX and UI are different jobs

• UX design decides what the player needs to do, in what order and with how many taps. Its outputs are flows, wireframes and prototypes.
• UI design decides how it looks: style, layout, colour, type, icons and motion.
• UI implementation builds the screens in the engine so they scale to every device and respond to input.

Some people do all three. On larger games they are separate roles, and missing any one of them shows.

Budget bands

Implementation in the engine is sometimes quoted separately. Ask whether a price covers design files only or working screens.

What you are paying for

1. Flow map. Every screen and how the player moves between them.
2. Wireframes. Grey-box layouts that fix content and hierarchy before any art.
3. Style exploration. Two or three directions for the look, applied to one key screen.
4. Screen design. Final art for each screen, including empty, loading, error and locked states.
5. HUD. The in-game display: health, score, controls, timers, minimap.
6. Icons. Currencies, items, abilities, settings. Icon sets grow quickly in RPGs.
7. Motion. Transitions, button feedback, reward animations.
8. Implementation. Prefabs or widgets, anchoring, safe areas and input handling.
9. Testing. Watching real players use it and fixing what confuses them.

What makes it expensive

• Screen count. A shop, inventory, quests, settings, social, events and passes add up fast.
• States. Each button and panel has normal, pressed, disabled and highlighted versions.
• Aspect ratios. Phones, tablets, foldables and desktop monitors all need layouts that hold. See foldable game design.
• Languages. German is long, Arabic is right to left, and Asian languages need different fonts. See Arabic game development and RTL and game localization cost.
• Ornate styles. Fantasy frames and hand-painted panels cost more than flat, clean styles.
• Late changes. Adding a feature after UI art is final means redesigning the screens around it.

The HUD deserves its own attention

The HUD is on screen for the entire game. It must be readable at a glance, stay out of the way and work under a thumb. On mobile, controls sit where hands rest, and important information should sit away from fingers and notches. In VR there is no screen edge, so information is attached to hands, objects or the world. Test the HUD in real play as early as possible.

Accessibility

Good interface design includes players with different needs: readable text sizes, colour choices that do not rely on red and green alone, subtitles, remappable controls and options to reduce motion. Building these in from the start costs little. Adding them later costs a lot. The European Accessibility Act has also made this a legal topic for some products.

Monetization screens

The shop, offers and pass screens directly affect revenue, so they get more iteration than most. Clear prices, honest value and fast purchase flows convert better than tricks, and stores have rules against misleading designs. See battle pass design and ads vs in-app purchases.

How to brief UI work

• A list of features and screens, even if rough.
• Three or four reference games for style, with what you like about each.
• Target devices and orientations.
• Languages at launch and later.
• Whether you need implementation or design files only.

A game design document should contain most of this.

How to lower the cost

1. Wireframe everything first. Changes at wireframe stage cost minutes. Changes after final art cost days.
2. Build a component kit. Buttons, panels, tabs and popups designed once and reused.
3. Choose a simple style that suits the game and scales to many screens.
4. Reuse layouts. Inventory, shop and collection screens can share one grid design.
5. Test with five players before polishing. Most problems appear in the first sessions.

Getting a quote

Send us a screen list and reference games. We quote UI and UX as a fixed price per milestone, and it is included in our full game packages on the offer page.

Sources: Apple Human Interface Guidelines: Designing for games · Game Accessibility Guidelines · Game UI Database. Checked November 11, 2026.

Related: 2D game development · Mobile game development · Get a quote