Studio: A Thinking Ape
Role: Senior/Lead Game Designer
Project Summary:
Party In My Dorm is a mobile live-service game with player-driven trading economy, PVP, deep social features and cosmetic customization.
Contributions:
My primary project at A Thinking Ape. My role included designing and launching features and content and acting as the primary monetization designer. I also served in a product management role, using analytics tools such as SQL, BigQuery, Looker and Google Sheets to perform player analysis, identifying issues and guiding our data-driven iteration.
Later, while partially retaining my individual contributor work, I was promoted to Lead Game Designer, leading the team, taking ownership of product outcomes, improving execution standards, mentoring and coaching designers and maintaining our roadmap.
Key Accomplishments:
In-Game Offers System
Party In My Dorm had outdated systems for selling IAPs in-game, buried in the UI and poorly merchandised.
I designed, implemented and iterated a brand new offers system that correct many issues and became a key monetization system, vastly increasing our ability to present offers in an attractive way. This was designed to be configurable and versatile, opening it be used in various non-monetization ways also.
This system remains an integral part of Party In My Dorm's monetization.
Spearheaded External Web Store Adoption
In an effort to decrease our platform cuts, Party In My Dorm implemented a 3rd party external web store.
I contributed design work to the initial design and setup of the first version of the store.
Most importantly, I lead a year long effort to shift player spend to the web store, despite stringent platform rules on external stores. Through experimentation with offer composition, cadence and building awareness, we eventually shifted the majority of our revenue to the web store after 1 year.
Monetization Impact
With no other designers desiring to take on monetization, I took ownership of those duties proactively. The first major event, I was able to execute on an offers strategy that contributed 15+% of the event's revenue.
Over the next 5 years, I continued to shepherd the continued growth of a game over a decade old. We broke several quarterly revenue records and raised ARPPU by 80%, over 5 years.