Game Designer | Producer
What I Did
- Designed and play balanced a multi-character class and unique mount system along with a mergeable weapon upgrade system
- Overhauled the FTUE to achieve a 97% tutorial completion rate and increase D1 retention by 20%
- White boxed early maps to prove out game mechanics and play balance character skills
- Managed tasks and data with ClickUp and Excel
Brief
BowRider.io is a top-down battle royale game on Android and iOS. The player's objective is to eliminate all opponents with their weapons and skills. Aside from the core gameplay, the player can collect new characters, mounts and upgrade the weapon.
Role
I was the designer and producer of the project. I focused on improving the tutorial, the battle mechanics, and the mount system. Meanwhile, I handled tickets, communicated with developers, and solved problems based on data and player feedback.
Tutorial
The previous tutorial had a low conversion rate, and most players didn't stay long enough to experience the main gameplay. It aimed to explain the battle mechanics step by step. However, it had a long learning period and contained many long descriptions.
My approach was only to teach the basic movement and attack in the tutorial and introduce more mechanics later in the first game. During the first game, we signified features such as skills, death zone, and item locations. On top of that, the difficulty is made easier by lowering bots' health points, damage, and accuracy.
The new tutorial allowed the players to jump into the fun part - the battle as soon as possible while not overwhelming by all the new game mechanics they encounter.
Advertisement Pacing and Opportunity
In the previous advertisement (ads) structure, the player saw interstitial ads after each game and reward ads for bonus rewards from games and extra resources from other features.
To increase the interstitial ad opportunity, I kept the battle mechanics and changed the game mode from deathmatch to battle royale. In the deathmatch mode, the player needed to kill as many opponents as possible to win the game within a fixed period. It made the game length the same in all games. In the battle royale mode, the player could die earlier than the set game time, which increased the chance to see more interstitial ads. On top of that, it also allowed them to spend hard currency or watch a reward ad to revive.
To increase the reward ad opportunity, I updated the rewards descriptions and added free trials to ensure the player understood the value of the rewards. For example, the first time the player revived was free.
Mount System
The team decided to improve the value of the mounts and had the players invest and collect more mounts to increase in-app purchases.
In the old mount system, the player owned all the mount types. When the player leveled up a match, their mount switched to the next one until they reached the max level. The player could unlock more mount skins by purchasing lucky boxes (a loot box system).
To make the mounts more attractive, I redesigned the mounts and tied them to the skills. So, each mount would give the player a unique skill instead of having all the skills in one game. It was easier to learn and allowed the players to pick playstyles before the matches started by selecting which mount to equip.
On top of that, the players gained not only new skins but also new mount types from the lucky boxes. This change encouraged the players to get more lucky boxes and increased in-app purchases.
