Mobile Game Onboarding Animation Design

We are building a polished iOS app for bar billiards and are looking for a strong motion designer / animator to take ownership of the onboarding and tutorial animation work for the MVP.

This is not a general UI design role, and it is not a marketing video brief. We already have UI/UX design underway. What we need here is a specialist who understands product motion and can create onboarding that is visually strong, technically practical, and genuinely useful to the user.

The onboarding is a core part of the product. Its job is to teach new users both how bar billiards works and how the app works, in a way that feels natural and intuitive. The key principle is that everything must stay grounded in the real table and the real actions a player sees in front of them. We want the user to feel, at every step: this is what I’m seeing on the table, this is what it means in the game, and this is what I tap in the app.

We do not want generic onboarding cards, abstract app-only animation, or motion that looks nice but does not teach anything. We want someone who can simplify gameplay into clear visual learning moments without losing the feel of the real game.

The onboarding is expected to be around 8 to 10 slides or scenes. We care more about quality and usefulness than keeping it artificially short. The likely flow includes: welcome to bar billiards, choosing whether the user is on a 3-pin or 4-pin table, table layout and hole values, building a break, banking a break, the red ball and double scoring, fouls and losing a visit, mushrooms and wipeouts, the timed bar-drop concept, and finally a scoring-in-the-app scene that bridges the real table to the app controls.

The animation work needs to cover moments such as balls being potted into scoring holes, breaks building up, a banked break being added to the total, the red ball scoring double, fouls causing a break to be lost, mushroom knockdowns and wipeouts, the bar-drop timing event, and the final scoring tutorial where real table events are mapped to app actions. One important detail is that the bar itself is inside the table, so this should not be treated as a large visible mechanism. In reality it is more something players hear than see, so the motion should focus on the timing event, the clunk, the trough behaviour, and the fact that play continues with the remaining balls left on the table.

Visually, we are looking for something clean, modern, clear, and product-focused. Not cartoon. Not photorealistic 3D. Not overly decorative. The ideal style is premium vector-based instructional motion that feels at home inside a modern iOS product. The table should stay visually consistent across the onboarding so users build familiarity as they move through it. Motion should feel smooth and satisfying, but clarity matters more than spectacle.

From a production point of view, we are open to the right workflow, but the output must be suitable for iOS implementation. A hybrid approach may make sense, for example Lottie for more passive instructional scenes and Rive or a similar interactive approach for the more state-driven scoring scene. We are open to a strong recommendation from the right person, but you should understand the difference between passive animation and interactive onboarding, and you should be comfortable producing work that a developer can realistically implement.

We will provide a full onboarding and animation production guide, slide-by-slide content, gameplay references, app context, and reference videos of real bar billiards. You would be working alongside an existing UI/UX direction rather than inventing the whole product from scratch.

We are specifically looking for someone with strong experience in motion design for products, apps, onboarding, or explainers. Experience with Lottie and/or Rive is highly desirable. You should be able to take a structured brief, understand gameplay logic, and turn it into motion that feels simple, elegant, and intuitive. We care as much about judgement and restraint as we do about visual polish.

Please apply with:

* relevant examples of app onboarding, product animation, Lottie, Rive, or similar work
* a short note on how you would approach this project
* the tools you would use
* confirmation that you can provide source files and implementation-ready exports
* your availability over the next 1–2 weeks

This is MVP-stage work, but if the first phase goes well there may be further follow-on work.

Applications without clearly relevant examples of product, onboarding, Lottie, or Rive work are unlikely to be considered. We are looking for quality, not volume.