Valor In Gaming

ViG is a top-tier Evony alliance on Server 428, competing for territory and standing across seasons that run for months. Its site had grown by accumulation — every win its own banner, every capability its own card, nothing ever removed. The homepage worked hard and landed softly.

The client maintains the site themselves, between seasons, with no build step and no developer on call — hand-authored HTML and CSS in single-file pages, deployed on Vercel. Changes had to ship on a live site mid-season without breaking working sections. We designed to that constraint rather than around it.

The alliance’s real edge — its intelligence work — sat at the same visual weight as the navigation beside it. The undefeated record was restated four times in a single scroll, sounding less like fact each time. The live command surfaces members relied on had gone quiet, and a layout fault had pushed one section past its height. A first-time visitor had no route through the page.

We mapped the homepage as a visitor experiences it — what the eye lands on first, what repeats, where attention drops. That audit protected three sections the client valued (the battlefield map, the alliance rationale, and Battle Radio) that had been bundled inside areas otherwise flagged for reduction. Reduction is only safe once you know what the page is carrying.

The live command surfaces — roster tables, standing gauges, progress rings, countdown timers — were brought back to working order first, so the design work happened on a page that behaved correctly. The section that had expanded past its bounds was returned to its intended height, bringing the lower half of the page back into reach.

We reduced in passes, safest first, checking the page held after each. The Academy went from nine cards to six, with one clear route to the full curriculum. The record went from four restatements to one, stated at full strength. Spacing was returned between sections so each block arrives on its own rather than in a queue.

Intelligence was given the lead, carrying visibly more weight than the sections around it, so the alliance’s real edge registers before it’s read. The timeline became four named eras — Foundation, First Crown, Ascension, Dominance — with the years reduced to quiet markers beneath. Typography was unified with the language the hero already set, so the page reads in one voice.

Hover and focus states were softened and ambient movement pulled back, so the interface stops competing with the content. Keyboard focus was made clearly visible, touch targets on the tactical filters were sized for thumbs, and anyone who prefers reduced motion now gets the page whole and still.

Two items were deliberately held and documented for the client: the full type scale (reworking every size at once would touch every surface simultaneously, and the disruption wasn’t earned) and the pillar structure (a change to the spine of the page, not its surface — a decision for the client to direct). Restraint is part of the work.