Lead your army, destroy your foes. Shape the world you play in your own way; defeat enemies, build up facilities, socialize with others, and more in Mobile Strike.
responsibilities
Design multiple feature releases per week
Maintain live economy of game via feature releases
Create tools for design team to speed up balance & data entry
Structure & design events for active players
Set up sale concepts to make content appealing to players
Intimate work with engineering, art & live ops teams to deliver feature requests
Role
My work on Mobile Strike & Game of War was a mixture of content creation, economy maintenance, and tool creation. Content for either game was made alongside the other to streamline release.
Content Creation
Per week I was responsible for multiple feature releases, often ranging from 2 to 6 with varied complexity & release dates. These features were typically either revenue or engagement driving. I laid out the last time the feature had a brand new hook or use case against where the game’s meta was, and if the adoption rate was ready for a new feature like this.
Typically my focus with features was to inject customization into the game more. When I took over as designer our player base was complacent and apathetic about new releases, buying into a feature purely on the basis of whatever had higher numbers. Over time I was able to introduce more features with multiple use cases to get players more engaged beyond spending to see bigger numbers. This meant introducing new features that let players pick and choose how to specialize, such as craftable potions, or segmenting the value of a feature over multiple buildings to get players to think about how to best upgrade their city.
New features I worked on also introduced new ways for players to interact with each other. Typically the game’s meta involved beating player bases down on the day-to-day and rushing events whenever active. I introduced a new battle arena where players specialize their heroes, which were previously only used for PVE, and fight against them in a specific timed zone.
Game Economy
The game’s economy revolved around premium currency & hard currency for each feature. Typically I would examine economy from an individual feature cost basis & an event distribution basis.
At the highest level we examined the expected value of each currency and weighed the benefits of the feature against this curve. Over time we saturated the currency into the game more via events to improve accessibility, which was factored into the design. Our plan typically looked at how long we expected the benefit of the new feature to stay relevant in the game’s meta against the cost of it.
Features were designed with key selling points for different types of players. Usually this involved projecting the use case of the feature against free-to-play & larger spending players. We laid out what was most appealing to each bucket of players and adjusted stat curves or drop rates accordingly.
Tools & Documentation
To streamline future releases I created tools in Excel to speed up the balancing and data entry portion of content creation. These ranged from chest drop rate tables to full blown combat calculators. Each tool included a calculator to balance the new feature against a pre-existing one of a similar use case, an output of all data to plug into live data, and handoff documentation for QA.
Alongside this I maintained documentation for all of our ongoing features for new designers to ramp up using and familiarize themselves with. This included a template with formulas for basic content creation as well as an overview for the necessary live data to access.