THE WALKING DEAD: SOCIAL GAME: CHRONICLES

The Walking Dead: Social Game: Chronicles is a mid-core dungeon crawling social game based on AMC's hit show The Walking Dead. TWD:SG:C features an exciting mix of stealth, combat, crafting and compelling interconnected storylines. The game was originally launched as The Walking Dead: Social Game and was later redesigned and rebranded. After being live for about two years, I worked with our brand partners to transform the core experience of The Walking Dead: Chronicles from a linear, menu driven experience into a Metroidvania with many interconnected stories that could be played as the player discovered them, rather than in a strict linear order. This vastly superior version of the game was rebranded as The Walking Dead: Social Game: Chronicles.

My Role on TWD:SG and TWD:SG:C

Created and maintained all game design documents that clearly and concisely presented feature designs to both our internal team and to brand partners for approval.

• Led the team in designing combat and progression systems that were both complex enough for an evergreen game and approachable for a more casual oriented audience.

• Collaborated with brand partners to create new storylines for TWD:SG:C that fit into the overall story world without disrupting the story of original missions.

• Created hundreds of missions designed to be played across dozens of interconnected maps in a Metroidvania Style. 

• Designed and documented the game’s economy while creating supporting simulations that predicted player progress both for the original TWD:SG and TWD:SG:C versions of the game.

• Collaborated with brand partners to ensure gameplay, themes, and content fit the brand.

• Led the team in the creation of multiple prototypes to explore the design space for combat against walkers (zombies) and find the most fun version of the gameplay that stayed true to the strict rules of the TV’s show’s world.

• Designed an event system that significantly raised engagement and monetization while active.

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

• Balanced dozens of weapons that players would use against walkers(zombies).

• Delivered substantial tutorial funnel and retention improvements through careful review of analytics and targeted improvements to tutorial steps and communication.

• Delivered continuous IAP monetization KPI growth by designing game features that were more fun to use when coupled with spending premium currency.

Redesigning the Mission and Story Structure and relaunching as The Walking Dead: Social Game: Chronicles

The version of TWD:SG:C that launched in 2012 had an extremely linear mission structure. Missions were given by NPCs in your base camp and then could be played from a menu on your HUD. There was no branching or story decisions of any kind left to the player. It was 100% completely linear, with that caveat that you could replay any mission you previously completed.

The open world system that I designed allowed players to unlock new areas on their World Map by completing story missions. Once unlocked, an area was open for exploration, with new walkers and treasures to find each time a player entered it. Each sub-chapter of the game has its own unique map with dozens of areas to explore. Rather than have all Story Missions given from NPCs in the base camp, I opted to move NPCs out of the base camp on occasion, so that players would need to track them down and rescue them to get their missions. The original Story Missions were treated as sacrosanct, with a few exceptions. However, in-between Story Missions, I had creative reign to insert any number of Side Missions for players to complete as long as the Side Missions narrative didn't interfere with the Story Missions narrative. I wrote, designed and built literally hundreds of new missions for players to complete.

The layout, and unlock sequencing of the World Map was inspired by Metroidvania style games. As you progress through a map, you unlock a few areas in one section and are given a hint of what the next areas are and how to get to them, but you must backtrack to different areas and complete missions there first. While there are no abilities, keycards or other mcguffins that specifically act to allow access to new areas, we knew that we needed to design the world as if it was there, so that those game mechanics could be added later without overhauling the map.

Redesigning the Combat System

There were two core problems with the original combat system that we addressed. 1) The walkers never increased in difficulty or complexity. 2) The combat interactions and equipment did not allow for progression or scalability of equipment or difficulty.

I completely redesigned the combat system to address these issues. The original combat system was a 2 click system. A player clicked on a walker to initiate a headshot mini-game. A moving reticule appeared over the walker and you then clicked at the right time to score a kill. There were 3 possible outcomes, you missed, you killed it or you Perfect killed it. A perfect kill was just clicking the reticule when it was perfectly centered over a walker’s head. This was a very limiting system that prevented scalability of weapons. There were 2 essential variables at play, the path of the reticule and the speed it travels at. The reticule can only travel so slow or so fast. There were dozens of weapons, but there were really only a handful of meaningfully different weapons. Compounding this problem is that every weapon always kills when a successful hit is scored. The cold, sobering reality is that anyone with a modicum of motor skill proficiency has no reason to purchase any new weapon, ever. There were a number of people that completed all the missions in the game without ever purchasing a single weapon.

The new combat system completely removed the headshot mini-game. Instead each weapon now has a range of damage it can do and a chance for a critical hit which causes double damage. This small change opened a floodgate of possibilities for making weapons stand out and feel different from each other. For example, bats have high damage, but a low critical hit chance, while makeshift weapons have inconsistent, but potentially high damage and a very high critical hit chance. They play completely different. You have to move around and position your characters in a different way to make effective use of makeshift weapons, because they are much riskier to use, but have bigger potential pay-offs.

Shortly after the open world and new combat system overhaul, we wanted to further differentiate weapons and add a way to reward players for using their new weapons. We added a new mastery system that took advantage of our existing character, weapon and zombie stats. When mastered each weapon has a massive stat improvement that is unlocked. These stats affect a weapon's, damage, critical hit chance, critical hit damage, defense and can also be combined with limiters, such as only applying the bonus against a specific type of zombie. A weapon might have +65 Damage or +22% Critical Hit Chance vs. Fresh walkers.