Situation…

The team was faced with the challenge of entering the saturated mobile market with a viable in-game economy, riding the trend of free-to-play social games at the height of their popularity in the mobile market boom of 2011-14.

Action…

I put together a comprehensive report analysing trends and design traits from successful titles in the market space that ABG was looking to enter, such as the CSR Racing games, among others. I broke down spending patterns, player profiles and reviews, and ethical considerations when monetising players’ time and attention.

When I returned for a second internship, I joined the level design team, helping prototype track layouts in 3DS Max and build environmental obstacles, taking great care to adjust the difficulty of each course in order to correspond with the player’s progress at that point in the game. The primary design discussions that took place concerned the amount of risk/reward for pursuing racing lines that were slower but yielded more monetary reward, set against racing lines that were faster but contained more obstacles in their path. This involved writing blocks of XML code to insert and adjust the placement of new obstacles, and hours of playtesting.

Whenever I encountered bugs, I was responsible for submitting Perforce reports to the programming team. The studio did not have a dedicated QA team at the time, so all Designers were expected to extensively playtest their own creations and report any issues in a timely and detailed manner.

Result…

After presenting my report to Exient’s management, I worked alongside the Design team drawing up documentation implementing the conclusions from my research. These documents formed the basis for the game’s free-to-play economy.

Upon release, the game’s core mechanics received critical praise. This project was my first exposure to studio production pipelines and gave me invaluable experience in multiple areas of design, including:

• Economy design
• Core concept development
• Content ideation and prototyping
• Level and track design
• Analytics and research insights
• Perforce and playtesting