Kingdom Age

Feature design and impact on KPIs

User Purpose

The point of the event is to drive monetization. The event is time-limited and the player must defeat the enemy with a certain amount of life. He has two options, a normal attack or a power attack that does a bonus amount of damage. The stamina is something that can be earned, but to be effective, the player must purchase them for the event.

Competition

Global leaderboards are the reason why the player is competing. Top players will get the best prizes that they can use in different events planned throughout the month.

Something for everyone

However, most players do not compete at that high level. To make the event meaningful for those other users, tier rewards were implemented so that players can engage at their own pace.

The Epic Boss feature was one of the first features I worked on while on Kingdom Age. First, a little background. Kingdom Age itself is based on the Crime City engine and the gameplay was very similar. However, analysis of the game showed that the players behaved very differently from one game to another. Specifically, Kingdom Age players did not like to compete and play Player vs Player modes and enjoyed more single-player and storytelling. Because of this learning, the team and I decided to work on an Epic Boss feature. In a nutshell, the objective for the player is that there are a series of bosses that get progressively harder with more life and more damage dealt. The objectives that we set out to have are:

Time-Limited, non-PvP event
Monetization by raising Average Revenue per Daily Spender
Engagement for non-payers

The second point was addressed through the use of a global leaderboard. At the end of the event, players who are in the top receive the best prizes. The third point was addressed through the introduction of prize tiers. This gave non-payers their own set of motivation that is not tied to PvP.

The feature was highly successful and I was able to raise our ARPDAU numbers by 36%.

NFL Shuffle

Card Design + Core Gameplay Design

Card Design - Initial

I worked on the original information with the three different stats shown: Strength, Speed, and Awareness.

Card Design - Final

The final information stats on cards (Strength, Speed, and Skill) did not change much from the initial design. Our UI artist (thanks Jeremy!) was able to translate our ideas from wireframes to actual in-game art.

Card Design - Final Card Front

The final card front also did not change much from the initial design. Some extraneous information was removed as well as a larger emphasis on the Overall card number (the blank space next to the "QB")

Card Design - Portrait pictures

During the design process, we discovered that a smaller representation of the cards were necessary.

Game Sim - Initial Design

The initial design called for players to go through training sessions. This part allows for rewards for the game. After a "week" (5 quests) of training, the player can then play his opponent.

Game Sim - Initial Design

The player can then pick an offensive and defensive formation for your lineup The different formations utilized different skills (Strength, Speed, Awareness). Additionally, there was an element of rock-paper-scissors in picking the formations.

Game Sim - Initial Design

Once the formation decision has been made, the player can then simulate the game with the result shown.

Game Sim - First iteration

The issue with card battle games is that the user has few input and thus a limited sense of engagement. I wanted to tackle that by introducing decisions the users would have to make for each play. A "Run" play would be low risk, low reward, while a "Long Pass" play would be high risk high reward.

Game Sim - First Iteration

This was the visual mock-up I wireframed to represent the animation sequence the users would experience if there was an exciting play. The purpose of this was to build up a sense of anticipation for big plays.

Game Sim - First iteration

The team and I realized that this design didn't effectively explain to the user why they won or lost each play. Without this explanation, the decisions made were not meaningful. Additionally, gameplay was slow and it was difficult to find excitement.

Game Sim - Final Design

The final design focuses heavily on the cards with the field still important to the user - it is a natural indicator of progress in football. The Swap and Shuffle features were introduced at this point to still provide users a level of input that affects the outcome of the game without making it overly complicated.

Game Sim - Final Design

The final design of the gameplay surfaces whats important in the game - the player cards. Success and failure of each play is determined by each card's number. Additionally, the rock-papers-scissors element is retained with certain positions having advantages over others.

I worked on one title, NFL Shuffle from pre-production all the way through its live operations state. Although I've had a hand in many parts of the game, the most important ones are the card design and the overall gameplay.

Card design was something I had a lot of reference to - as a kid, I grew up playing Magic: The Gathering and was familiar with much of the information needed. One of the biggest questions I had to answer was: "What kind of statistics do we want to portray on a card?" On one end, traditional social mobile Japanese card games have simple "Attack" and "Defend" stats on their cards. On the other end, fantasy football is a billion dollar industry with statistics on almost every minutiae. The move towards three stat numbers is deliberate because we wanted the game to be accessible for a wide audience as opposed to a smaller, hardcore group of users. Additionally, the three stats had to make sense for both offensive and defensive players - "Awareness" was a great stat for quarterbacks, but that does not translate as well for a linebacker or defensive linemen. These three stats are used in determining the outcome of each play success.

Zombie Jombie was the initial template for the NFL Shuffle gameplay. Players would determine what formation (Run, Short Pass, Long Pass) they would use during each game and the game would simulate with a final score. Given some play through testing, I decided that that there was a need for the player to call the play themselves - this gives the user much more input (and thus engagement) on the final outcome of the game itself. Success of each play was determined by risk vs reward. For example, a run play would be less risky, but the payoff in yardage would also be less. Although the artists and engineers were able to create a great deal of the game based on this design, we had to do another iteration. Play testing showed us that winning or losing each match wasn't entirely clear to the user. We decided to ultimately surface the cards much more prominently with an emphasis on the Overall stat. Although this concept was simplified from a visual standpoint, the rock-paper-scissors element is stil preserved among the player positions. In addition, the breakdown of the three stats (Strength, Speed, Skill) still allows for variability in the results. In order to give the user some control and strategy in the game, the Swap and Shuffle features were added into the game to influence the success or failure of each play.

Our approach to the game design was focused on providing the users with a unique experience - the choices matter. Although this may seem trivial, it is what makes it a unique experience especially for the NFL license.

Alien Family

Feature Design + Art Producer

Alien Family - Themes

This Cat themed building was used in one of our Live Events

Alien Family - Themes

These were some initial cat theme designs used in the game.

Alien Family was the first project I was on when I started at GREE. As a product manager, one of my tasks was to manage the art production pipeline. I worked on creating a new storyline for the game, art styles and themes as well as new UI screens for the game. The art theme process involves:

Coming up with the initial art theme based on user data
Create an art schedule timeline with the artists and outsourced animators and
Provide the character and building data (strength, rarity, dimensions, etc.) for the engineers.

This was definitely a lot more work than I thought! I definitely have newfound respect for producers in whatever it is they're trying to manage. It was was a great experience nonetheless.

When not managing the art production, I had the opportunity to do some wireframing and feature design for the game.

Memories Map

Redefining Roles + Changing Perspectives

Kicking Off

We were initially interested in tackling health issues. With my background in bioengineering, this was something that resonated with me.

Prenatal Care

Of the different health issues we brainstormed, prenatal care was extremely interesting to me because I knew next to nothing about it. I thought this project would give me a great opportunity to learn about something entirely new.

Needfinding

The process taught to gain empathy with the audience.

Needfinding

The process taught to gain empathy with the audience. Ms. Wilson explains to us some of the differences with her first and second pregnancies.

Needfinding

We were able to compare and contrast neonatal care from around the world. This mother was from Israel.

Needfinding

One trip we went on was to attend a seminar at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation to see what concerns soon-to-be parents had.

Learnings

We narrowed our interviews down to three key learnings...

Learnings

...all of which were huge tasks to try and address. Our team decided to focus on the fathers because that was an unexpected outcome from the needfinding process.

Point of View

The first step of finding a solution is to figure out the problem first. Ours was: Male partners of pregnant woman need to feel valued during birth because they are socially and emotionally alienated from the experience.

How Might We...

Asking the right questions is the hardest part of design thinking. We asked ourselves: "How might we help male partners of pregnant women feel valued during birth?"

Brainstorming

This was our first round of brainstorming potential prototypes and ideas to test.

Prototyping

Our first prototype was to create a starter kit for a father when they enter the emergency room. What stood out to us is that "Events" and "Roles" became an important element for the father.

Ideation

Our next idea was to create an auto-scrapbook based on feedback to encourage creativity and remove a huge barrier: time.

Feedback

Our simple prototype of sending messages to remind the fathers to do certain actions went over extremely well with fathers happy to do the simple tasks we asked of them.

Memories Map was a project I worked on in my Transformative Design class at Stanford University's d.school. The interest came out my background in bioengineering/health and a general curiosity in the pregnancy process.

In a nutshell, design thinking relies heavily on brainstorming and collaboration. This involves sessions of interviews to broaden our understanding of the situation, then brainstorming and narrowing down the core issue we would like to target. This process takes several iterations in a group setting - everyone's perspective from different backgrounds leads to unique observations and insights that allow us to ask the right questions and ultimately find a solution.

The project began with the group brainstorming potential health-related issues that everyone was interested in doing. After narrowing the topic down to prenatal care, a group mate and I started needfinding. The interviews we conducted together gave us valuable insight into the issues that people experienced during pregnancy. We started focusing on the fathers in the process because it was such an underserved group and that were equally as important as the mothers. In order for us to gain a deeper understanding of the issues they have, more interviews were conducted with the soon-to-be fathers. We learned that they actually felt ostracized in the process and wanted to take up a role while their wife was pregnant. It took us a bit of time to realize that a natural role for husbands is that of a recorder. Memories Map is a result of 7 weeks of user insight that helped us come up with a truly unique product for fathers.

Shop Differently

Need Finding + Ideation

Needfinding and Interviews

Insights

How Might We...

Our Perspective

Prototyping

Shop Differently was a project sponsored by the VF Corporation, who are more commonly known for their 7 For All Mankind brand among many others. The thesis of the project was to "Make jeans shopping more fun." We interviewed various shopping personas, explored shop layouts like The Gap, and talked to sales assistances at retail stores to gain insight on how shoppers buy jeans. The takeaways from this research were that most challenging part was to get people beyond brand loyalty to try on new pairs of jeans and surprisingly, shoppers found the process of trying on multiple jeans a huge burden.

After several iterations of ideas that ranged from an in-store redesign to a "hot or not" voting system, we came up with an idea of a "Magic Mirror" concept that of addresses the two problems. The group and I were able to come up with a simple prototype that showed an image of a glove super imposed on a glove. This demonstration gave us the confidence to to take it one step further as the video demonstrates. The idea is to remove the painful process of trying on numerous pairs of jeans and apply inspirations of fun and childhood experimentation with the "Magic Mirror" concept.

Designated Driving

Design Thinking + Prototyping

Needfinding

Brainstorming

How Might We...

Solutions for Tom's Friends!

Solutions for Tom!

In this project, we partnered with Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB-Inbev), one of the largest brewers in the world, to redefine the designated driving experience for the user. The biggest issue we saw was that designated drivers are oftentimes disinclined to maintain their role as the DD because they are left out from the group. At the same time, those friends who are drinking do not want to be judged for their actions. Finding that fine line is the "Badger."

The Badger system incorporates many of the user interviews that we have to create roles for the DD and his or her friends. In doing so, this aims to overcome the alienation of being a DD but also reenforce the responsibility of being the designated driver as the true "life of the party" despite being a teetotaler.