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How POGR Cut $30K and a Year of UI Work with Builder

June 4, 2026

Written By Amy Cross

POGR sponsors Blazium Games, a gaming community that is managed by ten developers, each of whom ships their own title. Two years ago, they built Blazium, a lag-tolerant engine that holds up at 300ms ping under network conditions that break most multiplayer games. They publish across Steam, iOS, Google Play, Epic, and itch.io, with a GOG pipeline in progress. Ten developers carrying multiple titles on a startup budget means every dollar and every week has to count.

UI was POGR's most expensive surface

Game UI is the most expensive surface in game development. It touches the interface a player interacts with every second, the environment they move through, the character art on screen, and the marketing pages that sell the game in the first place. Every one of those surfaces requires design, animation, and engine integration before anything can ship.

POGR's process compounded that cost at every step. The team designed UIs in Figma and ran them through custom conversion tools to produce structured HTML and React components. From there, engineers manually ripped components apart, wrote CSS by hand, extracted every SVG, and rebuilt the whole thing inside the game engine. Animation came at the end of that chain, scripted from scratch on top of static screens.

The numbers on their flagship project, Depths, tell the story:

  • $5K spent to reach 25% UI completion
  • $30K+ projected to finish the same project
  • 2.5 to 3 months for a quarter of the UI alone
  • A full year of development for the complete UI

The gaming industry offered no tooling to compress the cycle, and the AI tools that existed produced images that looked like UI but generated nothing usable in an engine. For a small studio shipping multiple titles a year, the math forced a constant tradeoff between shipping late, shipping over budget, or shipping with a UI that fell short of the game's ambition.

POGR adopted Builder, starting with the Figma plugin to automate Figma-to-React conversion on web projects. The team quickly recognized that Builder's output, clean CSS, SVGs, and built-in animation, was the same raw material a game engine needs.

That insight reshaped the workflow. POGR now has the Blazium team prototype their game UIs directly in Builder, exports the output as React or HTML, and converts the assets into native game engine formats, including C# for the Blazium engine. Animation logic carries through and is replicated in the engine's scripting language, like GDScript, meaning motion ships with the design from the start rather than being bolted on at the end.

Builder now runs the entire UI operation across ten developers and multiple games in production. The output is real CSS, real components, and real animation logic that survives the trip into a game engine, which is the gap no other AI tool fills for game studios.

A game main menu interface titled JUMPER featuring a yellow, blocky character flanked by floating stars, set against a blue and yellow sky with clouds and interactive buttons for starting or quitting the game.
MetricBefore BuilderWith Builder

UI cost on Depths

$30K+ projected

~$30K saved

Full UI development time

1 year

Weeks to months

Quarter UI build

2.5 to 3 months

Days to weeks

Initial $ invested for partial UI

$5K for 25% complete

Full UI in a fraction of the time

UI animation

Scripted manually after engine integration

Ships with the design

The savings compound across Blazium's roadmap. With multiple titles shipping a year, $30K saved per project, and a year of recovered dev time per project, this adds up to a fundamentally different operating model. Money that used to disappear into UI conversion now flows into gameplay, networking, and the systems that set a Blazium game apart.

Quality moved up alongside the cost and timeline gains. Blazium's team describes the result as making interfaces "feel alive," with motion players notice, polish reviewers reward, and presentation that holds up across storefronts.

"We were looking at a year and $30K to finish the UI on one project. Now it takes weeks. There's nothing else doing this for game studios."

— Randolph (Randy) Aarseth II, CTO & Co-Founder, POGR.io

POGR sees a wider opening here. UI is the highest-cost surface in game development, and tooling that compresses it produces compounding returns across every game a studio ships. Indie developers in particular have been entirely priced out of high-quality animated UIs, and POGR considers Builder the closest thing the industry has to a fix.

They're advocating for a dedicated Builder gaming module with native GitHub deployment, integrations across Unity, Unreal, and Godot, and multi-user editing with centralized source control. A module like that would automate the asset conversion and deployment steps POGR still handles manually, turning Builder into an integrated game UI pipeline. Tooling at that level would let a studio of 10 ship like a studio of 50, and would unlock the same workflow for thousands of indie developers still stuck in the Figma-to-engine grind POGR escaped.

POGR is now promoting Builder across the Blazium engine community, game jam circuits, and indie developer networks on social media. Their pitch is direct: no other tool is doing this for game studios, and the math on the other side of the switch speaks for itself.

POGR helps game developers and communities connect through player profiles, stats, and shared gaming experiences. Visit the community website, explore the platform, and join the Discord.

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