ARCHER: DANGER PHONE
Company
Truly Social Games Vancouver
Role
Senior Game Designer
Platforms
iOS, Android
Genres
Idle
Tech
Unity, C#
Design Skills
Gameplay, Economy, Narrative, Leadership
Our TSG squad worked with Disruptor Beam to finish Archer: Danger Phone and get it to worldwide release. While I only worked on it a little while, it helped me adapt to the East Side Game’s IdleKit system, which came in handy for my next project.
For Archer, I implemented a lot of the game’s story moments, game assets, adding in main level data, adding events, and reviewing analytics. It was pretty amazing implementing character and animations from the hit show. The writers did a stellar job hitting the tone, and the visuals were outstanding.
Economy Design
Adding progression data, event data, and balancing the economy was the majority of my work on the project. There was a lot of straight implementation, but equal parts tuning and balancing to fit Archer’s slightly different game economy. Even though it was grueling spreadsheet and number work, our players seemed to really love the game. Worth it.
- Hooked up and balanced main game progression data, character upgrade data, and facility upgrade data for many dozens of game levels.
- Created new events, and event data variants to provide different play experiences for existing event theme.
- Set up a low-cost event variant to increase 1st time purchase conversion. Revenue was slightly lower than the base event, but 1st time conversion notably increased. Our data suggested that converted players were very likely to spend again, so this was a big win!
Main Operation Screen with active Goals and Simulations
Agent collection with various special Alias unlocks selected
Gameplay Design
In the few breathers we had in our schedule, I jumped to work designed new feature proposals and updates to existing features to help improve the gameplay variety and narrative impact on the game.
- Tuned and balanced shootout gameplay and reward schema
- Designed UX and fun improvement proposals for shootout gameplay, like weapon selection, enemy variety improvements, and pattern variety.
- Evaluated and updated the design proposal for a Mission Dispatch feature. This would allow players to use their collected agents and costumes to run resource collection missions, adding an additional player retention mechanic to the game.
End of Operation Shootout gameplay
Narrative Design
The writers on this project were fantastic and hit the tone of the show with bullseyes. It was a pleasure to take their dialogue and implement it into the story scenes in the game. A lot of the camera positions, character placements, and animations used were up to my discretion, so I did my best to make them flow as perfectly as possible with the writing.
- Hooked up dialogue, character actions, setting, and camera framing for story moments across dozens of main game levels and event content.
- I creatively set up the presentation and animations for the characters to convey the intention of the scene, especially to emphasize comedic moments.
- Worked with writers to find content for the show to repurpose, and set up which characters to use for different event types
Operation 03 Story Moment
Design Leadership
After training up on the tools and implementation practices for the project, it eventually fell to me to help train and mentor our junior designer on the project.
- Mentored and trained junior designer on tools and best practices.
- Worked with product owner to set up event and reward schedule, as well as planning future event content
- Trained new designers on the project with our tool and event data setup methodologies