Live Operations
Game: Genies & Gems
Role: Lead Game Designer
Managed all live operations of the game including scheduling events, running A/B testing, and creating new live ops events.
Running a Live Game
Genies & Gems had been live for almost 4 years by the time I came on board as the lead game designer. In that sense, the game was completely live operated - every change to the game was done while players were actively playing the game. I was not only responsible for leading the design of new content and features, but also for managing the live ops of the game and making updates and changes to the already existing feature set.
Because the team was rather small, our bandwidth to push out new features was rather limited. Instead, I focused heavily on live ops to keep the game feeling fresh as well as address concerns that cropped up.
Live Ops Centric Design
One of the goals of the game modernization effort was to make Genies & Gems more live operable and to make the game feel noticeably different when the game changes via live ops.
To achieve this, I made sure to design the new UI with live operability in mind and made several parts of the UI configurable:
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Backgound Image - The large splash image was configurable via live ops and could update to draw attention to different parts of the game. I worked with the art team to create images that would highlight new events and features when they ran.
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Bonus Events - I designed a small and lightweight system that allowed existing events and features to be modified over the air without creating an entirely new event.
Above: Bonus events modifying the Star Chest and Collection event
Below: Backgrounds changing to match the bonus events
Scheduling
I managed all live ops during my time as the lead game designer. I was responsible for creating the event schedule as well as all the event configurations and grouping (rewards, requirements, targeting). I worked very closely with the product team develop an event cadence and continuously updated it as our player base and game evolved.
Example of live ops schedule that I managed
Completely OTA Events
On top of all the in-client events, I also designed and several completely over-the-air delivered events. All assets for these events were completely downloadable and they did not incur any development cost on the engineering team.
These events were able to be designed and launched extremely quickly (sometimes less than a week) and were used to keep the game feeling fresh with a relatively low development effort. They were also used to target immediate concerns or a low cost way to test ideas before fully committing dev time to them.
Different fully OTA events could be used to draw players to certain features or test out different configurations for events
A/B Testing
Every new feature was always A/B tested before launch to see what effect it had on the game. On top of that, I continuously collaborated with the product and data science team to A/B test different configurations for existing events. I lead the team through several major event reconfigurations that still exist in the game today. My responsibilities included identifying areas to test and what parts to change, writing test specs, and using our back end live ops tool to create and push the tests live.
Just as importantly, A/B testing also reveals what not to do to the game. For example, the video shows a test that I oversaw concerning the game speed. I increased the speed of the game and it resulted in an increase in engagement. However, several other iterations of event faster speeds were also tested, which resulted in loss in revenue.
Example of a change made via live ops that was tested and rolled out - increasing the game speed. Above is the original speed and below is the increased speed. This change led to an increase in rounds played.