Explore the real world to battle, trade, and most importantly: Catch ‘Em All in Pokemon GO.
responsibilities
Design & deploy various daily, weekly, and monthly live ops events for the game
Maintain live economy of items, resources, & Pokemon
Pitch & map out brand new features for events
Manage brand expectations with external parent company (The Pokemon Company)
Organize & flesh out tools & templates for design use
Coordination with marketing, engineering, translation, & player support teams
Role
My work is specifically centered on live content creation & event management. I use primarily existing features to create the events ongoing in game, and manage the game economy & tools holistically.
Live Ops Events
Pokemon GO events are driven primarily by collection, real-world synchronicity, and encouraging players to interact with the world around them. It is with these core values that typically we drive event creation.
Collection is the main draw to a franchise such as Pokemon, and one the game relies heavily on for excitement. Events highlight specific combinations of Pokemon that both sync with the real world event, with each other, or with new features on the horizon that make them appealing to players, such as Grass types during the Spring or Fighting types during a significant sporting event. In this way their real-world synchronicity becomes clear as we populate the game in a way that Pokemon would interact with our world, either by highlighting their unique identities or by weaving a narrative to show the Pokemon doing something with our world, such as if Electric types ran rampant during a stormy season or migrated for a season.
Fitness and real-world interaction is an ulterior driving factor in event creation. Being an AR game designed with lots of fitness syncs means designing events that both make sense thematically and that drive players to explore more. Many systems in the game exists as “levers” to push people to play different ways, such as highlighting new Pokemon in eggs that must be incubated by walking, Pokemon appearing at Raids which must be moved to, or the types of Pokemon that will accompany them in the wild. Encouraging people not only to interact with our game but the real world they are around is a unique factor in event design to us.
Game Economy
I am one of a handful of point people on managing the in-game economy, primarily focused on player collection rates and managing the stream of content players will interact with for the game’s lifespan.
Because Pokemon GO hinges on the pre-existing Pokemon franchise, economy balance is a tricky one of cat-and-mouse where we are driving the game towards the end of the existing Pokedex faster than new Pokemon are added to it by parent The Pokemon Company. Effectively what this means is our game’s Pokemon economy has a ceiling that we cannot directly manage or interact with in any way while we climb towards it, forcing us to get creative with content rollout in areas outside of Pokemon.
To combat this we have adopted more of a content trickle, highlighting singular Pokemon or families on their own and leveraging the unique identities of these Pokemon more. For example, we can highlight a Pokemon’s debut thematically with an event (such as a Fire type that releases in the summer), the shiny variant of that Pokemon, and new evolutions, forms, attacks, or more to give it increased time in the spotlight. These all still hinge on a pre-existing ceiling of content outside of our control, but give us more flexible options with a finite number of Pokemon.
Tools Management
One of the additional roles I hold is as keeper and organizer of our internal Game Master Template system. It is with these templates that we make edits to any number of fields on Pokemon, items, systems, and more, balancing them to specification with the Pokemon brand and our event and usability standards. These templates control the front end of the entire game and my role in using them is both to create events and to manage the live game side of things.
The design team splits responsibility primarily into back end feature development work & management, brand new tentpole feature management for the newest and most highlighted releases (Such as Buddy when it launched or the GO Battle League when it opened), and the front end game management. I take on the front end role, and keep a tight organization of the tools for that and where they live, how they are updated, and ways to streamline these tools.
A lot of this management comes down to keeping the live game economy up-to-date with the massive database of information to maintain, such as spawn rates, specific Pokemon variant rarities, and economy distribution. It also includes keeping a succinct storage of all existing tasks, quests, and the catalog of Pokemon for easy future and cross-functional use, which I take point on.