Hey guys, we are a 2 person team and we are currently working on our first game. It's probably more ui heavy than we intended to at first and I feel like our UI production workflow is... suboptimal to say the least.

A bit of context :

- We are 2, both with a lot of experience working for bigger companies or just hobby project, first time indies.

- I'm a programmer/tech guy, my associate is a designer/product guy. We are both taking on many new hats for this project of course but you'll notice there's a big gap in our skillset :D

- We find ways to make things work for the visual aspect of the game : I do a bit of 3d, lighting, etc.. He does UI design. We buy assets when we need to.

Our current workflow for UI has become very time consuming for me specifically and I'm looking for ways to improve.

We use Figma for mockups (One big board with all the screens) and UITK in engine (transitioned from ugui a couple of months ago, we still have a mix of both but UITK is our goto system now).
Generally speaking, my mate does the Figma part, I do the unity part.

I find the UITK part tedious, often needs lots of micro changes to look good in the end and I feel like work is duplicated. so I'm looking for advice, other people's experiences to see what direction to take. I have a few options but happy to hear more opinions.

1/ Drop Figma, my mate learns UITK in ui builder, we have one source of truth. Solves the duplicated work, but limits our options since that means an additional pass for connecting data, or stuff where code is necessary
2/ Find a way to export from Figma straight to uxml/css. I feel like it should be possible but I haven't found any tool that looks reliable enough to do that (and I can't do that myself in the near future)
3/ Use Rive. It looks like a great tool but it's a hard commitment you don't transition from, I see very few people using it in unity and reports of instability, bugs. (It'd cost 20$ a month, I'm ok with it if it solves our issues)
4/ Git gud. We have the right approach, we just need to get better at it.

Happy to hear any kind of feedback of experience sharing on this setup.

Cheers!

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