Live Ops / New Features
Highlights
Adding Live Ops to mainly static games, I helped engaging the players more
Integrating live ops in games that didn't have the structure for them was a challenge! In my experience, I tried to take a "template-oriented" approach, while being respectful of players' behaviour and production limits.
To keep players engaged over the long term without burning out a small team, I focused on building “lean” Live Ops solutions. My goal was to move away from bespoke, one-off events and toward a systematic approach. It’s an ongoing, experimental process, but we’ve anchored it in a few core principles:
- Empowering Non-Technical Teams: Designing templates that allow designers and producers to spin up events without needing a dev in the loop.
- Reusable Patterns: Creating systems with high customization potential to keep content feeling fresh.
- Expansion over Experience: Designing systems that can grow and scale, rather than just one-time “contained” experiences.
- Radical Collaboration: Maintaining a constant feedback loop with tech and production to ensure our designs never outpace our technical constraints.
- The “Launch and Learn” Philosophy: We lean heavily into analytics to understand our audience. Since qualitative testing can be tricky with our demographic, I helped design the data hooks that tell us what players are actually doing.
The result is a “machine” that’s starting to run itself. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s evolving, and most importantly, it’s being used.
Case Studies: Scopa/Briscola Live Ops
Viaggio Nella Storia (Journey Through History): I designed the templates and graphics for this framework. It takes the game’s core loop and re-wraps it in a thematic progression.
- The Champion Tour: By iterating on the “Journey” framework, I worked with the dev team to shift the focus from arenas to the opponents themselves. This “Champion Tour” allowed us to spotlight character-driven competition using the same underlying system.