During my time at Lockwood, I took up the role of Live Ops Designer on their massively multiplayer social platform Avakin Life. This saw me take game design responsibilities with particular respect to the game's live model. Including but not limited to designing new features to promote engagement.
In particular, I was in charge of developing whole NPC and Quest systems to be used to create new gameplay experiences as part of frequent in-game events.
Much of the challenges I encountered when working on Avakin centred on developing an understanding of our audience based on community feedback and analysing of metrics. Avakin sees a userbase of over 1 million users per day, many of whom interact with the game in very different ways, and have very different levels of experience with the game.
This called for a process of repeated reflection and iteration on design, also accounting for new developments in our production stack. E.g. we moved from a traditional quest model rewarding in-game items directly, to implementing event currency.
Developing a system for integrated content delivery in the form of interactive experiences.
When I joined LKWD, they were very much treading new ground when it came to the NPC / Quest system. The vision was there, but the first pass as implementation was less than ideal.
I was tasked with working with web engineers to establish a new tools system that allowed myself and future designers to implemtent more complex content with greater ease.
What we came up with was LKWD-RED, a node-based system based on Node-RED.
I pushed for a node / event based system based off of the increased prevalence of visual scripting in industry. I drew heavily off of the Unreal Engine's Blueprint system when designing the base functionality needed.
What's covered here only really goes into detail on quite a small amount of the work I've done on Avakin, but I thought I'd focus on the most interesting bits!