STORAGE WARS: THE GAME

Storage Wars: The Game is an auction & hidden object social game on facebook based on the hit A&E TV show. SW:TG features a heart-pounding mix of frantic auction bidding, storage room evaluation, searching for hidden treasures and snappy comments by the other bidders.

My role on the Storage Wars: The Game
I was the Lead Game Designer on SW:TG from 2011 to early 2012. I also pitched in with QA when necessary.

 My responsibilities on Storage Wars: The Game included designing game systems, creating and maintaining documentation, economy balance, writing dialog and copy and QA testing. During my time on SW:TG I led the design of the hidden object game systems, rebalanced the economy during several major overhauls, wrote funny descriptions for players to read on literally thousands of objects.

To capture the spirit of the show, we focused on a couple of key aspects; estimating the value of storage lockers, fast paced bidding, hidden object gameplay and treasures and witty dialog.

Each storage locker was randomly generated and filled with garden variety items, hidden bonus money and sometimes even hidden treasures. Each of the hundreds of garden variety items could appear at several levels of quality. Using your mouse to roll over it would reveal partial information about its value, simulating a bidder's ability to estimate the total value of a storage locker. Careful viewing of the locker could reveal hidden treasures which dramatically increased the locker's total value.

The bidding process was fast paced and filled with snappy dialog from your opponents. Just like in the show, they would try to fake you out, or goad you into spending too much or convince you the room was worth less than it actually was. Each of the AI opponents had a general sense of the storage locker's value, but through skilled bidding you could still take lockers for a steal or trick them into overspending.

After winning an auction you could view every item that you won before continuing to the next auction. Each of the hundreds of items could appear at several different levels of quality, and needed a set of possible descriptions to pick from. Sealed boxes were incredibly common in the show, and we felt that was an important part of the feel of the brand to capture. It was not enough to have only a few descriptions for the cardboard boxes. Anything could be in a box, from old newspapers to used wigs or even scary ghosts! I ended up writing more than 1500 descriptions of things that could be in boxes.