Empires & Allies

Senior Designer - Zynga

April 2014 - September 2016

I was on the Empires & Allies project for almost 2 and a half years with my primary role as mission and feature designer. There were about 280 missions total and I produced over 150 of them including an additional 20 for a special weekly event.

Duties

• Game feature and event specifications written for engineering and art teams.

• Mission design – Over 150 missions authored.

• Fiction written for overall narrative and character background/personalities.

• Identified areas of improvement based on live player data and feedback and created new content.

In addition to the mission content, I was also responsible for numerous feature design specifications including the inventory system, dynamic environmental switching feature, narrative outline, and numerous smaller specs. 

The feature that I am most proud of is the weekly tower event which I called Operation Killswitch. In it, players battle mission after mission with the help from friends in the form of an AC-130 Gunship that can be used during these missions, as seen in the feature introduction video below:

Operation Killswitch is still in the game as of today, running for over 5 years. This was a total team effort with a couple of engineers, artists, PMs, and myself figuring out all of the details. And the gunship controls were derived from our UI expert who created a Flash mockup on device. Once we tested the control scheme, it was an offset control allowing the player to both see and pinpoint where AC-130 could shoot, we immediately knew this was what we were going to ship with.

Below, this Snow Battle was as test that we did to prove that an environmental change could happen in-game. Unfortunately, we were not able to implement some key tech that would allow this to happen globally. I hope the current team running the game will be able to implement dynamic environments in the future!

In addition to my main functions on the E&A team, I also took the responsibility of taking screenshots for marketing and wrote a screenshot best practices guide specifically for this game.

Two of my prouder moments on E&A was receiving two Rock Star Awards for Excellence in Design. These are voted on by the leads on the team. I am so honored to have received these awards and appreciate my leads recognizing my work!