This role wasn't what I had expected but I learned a lot about the industry and how things can quickly change.

Initially I was brought in to mentor a design team and attempt to improve their core game project, PlayPhoto, but things quickly evolved into a churning, start-up feel, where we were developing multiple small release projects every month and using soft launch data to see if they were sticky.

As part of this, we did realse TENS! which proved very popular but I didn't get along with much of the development practices. I appreciated the creativity and drive, especially in prototyping and using data to drive understanding, but I prefer to stick with games and solve their problems rather than just creating bite-size experiences.

TENS! was a concept previously created by one of the producers and their friends, which we developed into a successful mobile launch.

My main task was to create a coherent daily experience with the game to drive retention and engagement. This included creating a brand new challenge progression mode, where new types of tiles appear on the play field to help or hinder the player, and a puzzle mode using those same tiles.

Competition among friends was high due to these additions and so I designed a very simple Halloween event where players were bucketed into one of two teams and gained rewards when their team reached a milestone of participation before their opponents. This was the first successful live event run at Kwalee.

I arrived at Kwalee with this game as their only launched title. It was showing fairly promising metrics but not standing out as a market leader. As part of the analysis of the product, it was decided to completely update the drab and dated interface and theme into something more iconic and vibrant.

Numbers improved but not to the level the company needed to call it a success. This was in the main due to the UGC element of the core mechanic - it was difficult to create good quizzes for the game.

With this being a bottleneck for the other players, I determined that the best course of action would be to seed several good quizzes per week but, as the game's model relied on the players to take on the responsibility of sourcing images for their quizzes, it quickly became clear that licencing and copyright would quickly come into play if the developers were creating the quizzes.

Due to the direction of the company changing, the game was sunsetted.