Terrible Pets

Stories and Games

Product Design - UI/UX - Illustrations

The product(s)

Terrible Pets started as a playful online card game where players combined cards to create hilarious, over-the-top 3-card combos, but it quickly grew into a much larger, character-driven world.

To bring the game to life, we created eight unique animal characters, each with their own personality, backstory, and personal struggles that led them to Animals Anonymous, a quirky woodland camp that became the heart of the Terrible Pets universe.

The world kept expanding with the introduction of potatoes, mischievous little creatures who lived around the camp and stirred up trouble. They became the stars of side quests, comics, and animations, adding humor and depth to the overall experience.

The game

The potato builder

Meet the pets

The role

I initially focused on designing the game app, handling both gameplay flows and early UI work. As the project evolved, I began hand-drawing all the game’s characters, which led us to hire a junior designer to take over much of the app’s UI work — freeing me up to focus on world-building and character design.

I created the entire Terrible Pets universe, developing backstories, lore, and visual designs to give the world personality and cohesion. This included designing and illustrating the Potato Builder, a creative tool that allowed users to generate their own custom potatoes from a library of 2,344 hand-drawn assets, enabling millions of possible combinations.

This blend of product design, illustration, and storytelling gave Terrible Pets a unique identity, balancing gameplay, humor, and character-driven narratives to keep players engaged across different formats.