About Me

I shape every part of a game’s design from concept through release and beyond into live operations. I focus on finding the fun that delights and engages users, all while delivering business success through innovation, player centric design, and data driven design.

Extensive Experience in F2P and Casual Game Design

  • 10+ years of experience designing F2P Games.

  • 15+ shipped games as a game designer, senior game designer, or lead game designer.

  • Experience designing economies, systems, and content for a wide array of genres and audiences: Casual arcade, social casino, idle, turn based combat, merge, educational, stealth, adventure, hidden object, sports, web3 and infinite runner.

Projects

  • ZOO-F-O Escape

  • Shark Tank Tycoon

  • Taps to Riches

  • Coin Dozer: Haunted

  • The Walking Dead: Social Game: Chronicles

  • Storage Wars: The Game

  • 15+ Other titles

Designing Fun Systems / Features that Players Love

  • Focusing on designing systems that are first and foremost fun to play!

  • Designing, implementing, and balancing a wide variety of game systems across many genres.

  • Designing advanced rules for systems that drive player behavior, ensure economic balance, improve user experience, and much more.

  • Creating appropriate levels of economic complexity for the target audience to achieve the best mix of fun, engagement and monetization.

  • Defining, advocating for, and advancing the game’s vision to internal teams and brand partners.

Designing Innovation and Market Research

  • Inventing new game mechanics and systems that surprise, excite and delight players.

  • Reshaping successful designs from other genres or games to fit into our games.

  • Translating systems from more complex to less complex and vice versa.

  • Evolving mechanics in new and compelling directions to increase engagement, monetization and player satisfaction.

  • Finding insights from playing and researching other games in a wide variety of genres and translating those into designs that work for our games

  • Deep understanding of the marketplace, successes and failures of other games and their individual features.

Designing for scalability, flexibility, and maintainability

  • Creating designs for evergreen systems that last for years and are ripe for future updates, content and evolution.

  • Understanding of the cost and effort to maintain systems and add content over the lifespan of the product.

  • Actively considering the reality of the development team’s capabilities and availability when designing systems.

  • Designing systems with ab tests and adjustable features that are likely to improve KPIs.

  • Creating design and content workflows that allow for easily adding new content and adjusting existing data.

Designing economies

  • Designing and balancing characters, weapons, items, collectibles, obstacles, enemies, levels, and more.

  • Creating mission systems and activities to facilitate long term player engagement and progression.

  • Creating and maintaining comprehensive, detailed, and well organized spreadsheets that clearly define all economic data.

  • Building simulations/models of player progression through the game economy with many adjustable parameters that can be used to help understand the impact of adjustments to the economy.

  • Continually tuning and updating simulations/models as live-data from real players comes in.

  • Shaping the balance of complexity and depth in economic systems by creating systems and products that give players meaningful choices while stripping unnecessary rules that add complexity and risk to development.

  • Staying abreast of the state of the broader F2P marketplace, in particular of games in the same genre to extract insights from the competition.

  • Deep diving into the economies of competitor’s games to understand what they are doing well and to find pitfalls to avoid.

  • Researching economies of other games & sharing insights with the team.

  • Translating big economy design wins from one game to others in the company catalog.

Monetization for F2P Economies

  • Consideration of player psychology and behavior to know when and why a player is likely to desire a specific virtual product so that it can be surfaced to them at appropriate times.

  • Designing virtual products that players will see the value in and enjoy consuming.

  • Appropriately introducing players to virtual products and the frequency of their free awarding to help remind them of how much fun the premium experience is.

  • Creating natural pinch points to drive monetization and short-lived peaks to make players feel powerful.

  • Designing user interfaces that help players understand the fun and economic value of monetization activities.

Designing meta systems

  • Shaping long lasting systems that players want to use to increase their player power and richness of their collections.

  • Designing systems that have opportunities for fun and exciting monetization without making players feel frustrated with the game or its developers.

  • Carefully crafting systems that cannot be defeated by players cleverly navigating the free economy or taking advantage of monetization opportunities.

  • Creating systems that support the economy with helpful and exciting monetization opportunities.

  • Ensuring the creation of richness, depth, and meaningful choices to keep players engaged for years.

  • Designing meta systems that can support future expansion and more advanced rules.

  • Recognizing and avoiding systems that are prone to brittleness or limited expandability.

  • Designing and tuning the economy to encourage high engagement for evergreen games that last for years.

Content Creation

  • Designing procedurally generated systems and content to populate those systems.

  • Building spreadsheets that can translate complex data sets into formats that are easy for engineers to work with.

  • Designing progression map systems and associated content.

  • Designing, implementing, and writing content for short and long form in-game stories.

  • Creating and implementing all sorts of content from characters to missions, collectibles, and much more.

  • Designed, implemented and balanced 1000+ characters, 3000+ items, 1000+ missions, 100+ levels, 100+ achievements.

  • Wrote 10000+ lines of dialogue, character descriptions, mission descriptions, flavor text, and more.

Live-Ops

  • Leading the design of a game’s live-ops strategy and collaborating across game teams and departments to share learnings and translate systems and big wins into multiple games.

  • Design live-ops systems that work together with the game’s core systems to drive engagement and revenue.

  • Guiding the creation of a variety of live-ops systems with varying levels of intensity to keep players engaged and monetizing without causing burnout.

  • Designing live-ops systems that are reusable with easily swappable content, balance, rewards, and scheduling.

  • Designing live-ops systems that drive fun, player satisfaction, revenue and engagement.

Documentation

  • Creating and maintaining detailed game design documents that clearly communicate the vision of the game and individual features to the team and stakeholders. Documentation covers things such as systems, mechanics, UI/UX interactions and micro interactions, user flows, system flowcharts, data spreadsheets, pitches, RFP responses, ab tests, etc.

  • Clearly delineating between documentation for the live version of the game vs. upcoming and ongoing implementation.

  • Regularly upkeeping legacy documentation to ensure the development and QA teams have documentation reflecting the reality of the currently live version of the game.

  • Establishing best practices for documentation by standardizing formats and collaborating with the development team to ensure ease of use.

Player Centric Design

  • Building a deep understanding of player psychology, player archetypes and player centric design.

  • Designing for the experience players want to enjoy and engage with, not just the one that we believe is the most pliable for monetization.

  • Advocating for both players and developers. Happy developers make great products for players!

  • Listening to and empathizing with players to improve their experience and ensure their continued engagement with the game and the company’s broader product line.

  • Collaborating with QA and customer service departments to collect and analyze player complaints, sentiment, and hot topics. Use analysis to drive improvements and address problems.

Leadership

  • Managing and mentoring junior designers and QA team members aspiring to become designers.

  • Collaborating with mentees to set achievable, measurable goals that help drive their career progression and add value to the game.

  • Regularly meeting with mentees to review their work and provide feedback.

  • Actively pursuing the well being of team members by ensuring that workloads are properly scoped, removing roadblocks, mitigating risks, and reducing unnecessary crunch.

  • Designing features that will create a meaningful, positive impact on the health of the product, while keeping in mind the strengths and work styles of the team so that we can deliver the best game possible to customers.

  • Fostering a creative environment where team members are celebrated for engaging in creative activities and sharing their successes with the team. Engaging in creativity, particularly in activities outside your comfort zone, helps you grow as a creative person.

  • Proactively evolving processes to improve workflow and alleviate development team frustrations.

Data & Analytics

  • Conducting a daily review of critical KPIs product health to ensure product stability.

  • Using analytics to proactively find and address problems.

  • Designing AB tests and analyzing results to derive insights and drive KPI growth.

  • Collaborating with engineering and data science teams to design analytics events for all aspects of the game.

  • Deep diving into data to find areas of opportunity.

  • Following up on ab test results with the development team to share the outcomes of tests and features. The more the team knows about what works, the better they can contribute to the design process.

  • Sharing wins with other internal teams so successes in one product can be replicated in others.

Collaboration

  • Consulting tech and art leads to ensure feasibility of features and content requirements.

  • Leading team brainstorms to generate feature ideas, come up with new content, and generate innovative solutions to tricky design problems.

  • Actively seeking out subject matter experts on the team for their input during the design process.

  • Fostering a creative and open game design atmosphere. Anyone and everyone is welcome to contribute! Different personalities feel more or less comfortable in different settings, so I work to create opportunities for everyone to contribute.

  • Actively listen to suggestions from the team and player community.

  • Thank and celebrate team members when they make design contributions.

  • Collaborating with cross-functional teams of all types to deliver the best product possible. Everyone from the design team, QA, engineering, art, data science, and user acquisition has great ideas to contribute!

  • Working closely with the team to align the systems, content, and economy with technical feasibility and user experience goals.

  • Coordinating with game designers, developers, and artists to implement features that respect the overall creative direction, ensuring the gameplay meets the project’s goals.

  • Collaborating with the user acquisition team to continually shape the experience to fit the audience.

Brand Partnerships

  • Respecting and upholding the unique qualities of intellectual properties.

  • Ensuring game mechanics, characters, story, themes, quests, and metagame align with the brand and its goals.

  • Collaborating with brand stakeholders to shape the vision of the product from a high level down to the details.

  • Educating brand stakeholders on the special properties of games that make them so much fun and how those can be leveraged with their IP to create a game players will love.

Programming

  • 1 shipped game as a programmer.

  • Contributed to programming on 5+ games.

  • Client side programming in C#, Actionscript 3.0, Lua, and GML.

  • Comfortable learning new languages, file formats, proprietary tools, etc.

Prototyping

  • Leading teams in developing digital prototypes for new games and new features.

  • Teaching junior designers and QA team members the art of paper prototyping.

  • Organizing and leading multiple game jams to encourage a creative atmosphere and help everyone improve their ability to rapidly generate and iterate on ideas.

  • Creating dozens of prototypes as a solo developer, some of which evolved into shipped features or full shipped games.