Battlegrounds: Ascension – Design, Narrative, & Production (July 2019 – April 2021)

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Autochess | Mobile | F2P | Fantasy | In Early Access

Official Website | Google Play Store

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After six years in development, I was brought on  in mid-2019 as a design consultant to help ship the Beta release. There were many outstanding design and production issues, and my role expanded from a consultant to a mix of a design lead, game writer, and project manager. We successfully released the Early Access Beta in June 2020.

Tools: TortoiseSVN, Bluestacks, Gamesparks, MS Visual Studio, Unreal Engine, Discord, GSuite, Jira/Confluence, Trello

Management – Delegated work to design team, gave constructive feedback/one-on-ones, and mentored one design intern and another part time designer

Documentation – Archived legacy GDDs, wrote new GDDs, documented new Design Log practice, and created centralized design resource directory to resolve dev roadblocks for design communication

Design Collaboration – Weekly Design Review and collaborations with stakeholders (designers, project lead, art lead, animator, QA lead, programmers), design polish focusing on main mechanic features (unit deck, synergies, unit movement, match making, etc.), accessibility features, and UI polish (mainly menu design, player feedback icons, and communicating unit movement), and workshopped new game vision pitches needed for project pivot

Economy Design – Designed Autochess F2P economies for the beta – 10 levels of content including: rewards (free and premium), xp/levels, daily challenges, quests, player profile/Battlepass (free and premium), player seasons (8 week game events), and in-game currencies (free and premium). Also created economy design guidelines, economy balancing workflow for Unreal, and concepted and documented F2P monetization design and subscription model

Production – To solve several major production roadblocks keeping the project in dev limbo: Established beta release deadline, ran weekly lead standups, documented feature prioritization, cut features, and wishlist features, scheduled sprints, performed progress one-on-ones for status updates and to solve dev roadblocks, defined, documented, and lead vision for the beta until release, and scoped project and team capability

Narrative – Wrote and edited season quest narratives based off Cyclope and Arcane synergy tiers, 56 VO barks for unit Ultimate attacks, 56 skill names for unit Ultimate attacks, and 56 Lore Quotes for each units Ability Overview Cards

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