Playdemic (EA North)
Golf Clash
I rejoined Playdemic as a Senior Game Designer working on the massive mobile game Golf Clash. Working at Playdemic and specifically on Golf Clash has allowed me to work on a large array of features, creating new experiences and tweaking the existing ones. I am often the main point of contact for those with design questions and often trusted by the leadership team to make tough design decisions. The freedom and trust I have been given at Playdemic has really improved my game design skills and has allowed me to be a lot more confident.
A brief overview of my job includes:
Concept design creation - Identifying existing problems or being given opportunities to improve the game and then creating a concept/pitch design document.
“One Page” design creation - This involves expanding on the concept documentation and putting together a much more clear image of what the feature will do.
Finally a full GDD for the feature, this includes all the relevant documentation for all departments, wireframes and flows.
As a Senior designer I run design feedback sessions and act as a first point of contact to the rest of the feature design team.
Currently I am working as the temporary team lead whilst we wait to hire a new lead.
My new responsibilities are:
Review/signing off design work.
Working on long-term designs/strategies.
Overseeing all design features currently in production.
General team management responsibilities.
Senior Game Designer
September 2023 - Present
Clan World Tour is a 7 day event that pits 3 Clans within Golf Clash against each other to see who gathers the best score on the Main Course.
I was the only Game Designer working on the feature at Playdemic for the majority of the feature. I worked with the external team to help create documentation as well as review and iterate on the documentation. I helped shape the early design of the feature and got to be involved from start to finish. I was heavily involved in the data architecture and setting it up in a way that could be easily handed over to Live Ops in the future.
The main goal of the feature was to create an engaging new mode that utilised our Clan mechanics and help grow the social/community side of Golf Clash. We released the feature as an “Early Access” mode which allowed us to use the early data from the mode to balance and perfect the feature.
Clan World Tour
Road to Fame was one of my first features on Golf Clash, the goal of the feature was to allow for the onboarding of new players via a stress free single player mode. As it was focused on onboarding new players we decided rogue-lite gameplay would allow players to fail but boost their chances of success next time, keeping them engaged with the core loop of the game.
I created the vast majority of documentation, syncing with all departments and coordinated the internal play testing sessions.
Road to Fame allowed us too see how much of an impact single player modes could bring to Golf Clash. Shortly after we implemented solo play into future features such as Quick 9 and Solo play tournaments.