Background
Flowplay has been in business going back to before the invetion of the iPhone. A lot has changed since then. Due to the success of Flowplay's first social casual casino, Vegas World, they create a sequel called Casino World. The idea was to update the original concept with more robust meta-game, refreshed ui, and avatar system.
Process
My job was to help design a system where players could make in-app purchases to earn larger and larger daily rewards, gain a sense of accomplishment, and status. We settled on the concept of a city builder mechanic.
I started by creating extensive wireframes to review with the team and stakeholders.
I consulted with the art team and developer to create the look, feel, and interactions for the buildings. You can rearrange the buildings, put them in storage, and collect treasure.
We designed a shop interface where players can purchase new buildings.
After launch, I pitch the idea of a social hub for the cities. This would let players see cities made by their friends and compare their cities with other players on leaderboards across the game. We borrowed the concept of performance brackets from successful PVP style games so that players of similar position would be ranked with each other. I created a design proposal and sketched wireframes explaining how this could work. Here's a excerpt:
The social hub significantly increased engagement as players enjoyed seeing other people's city layouts and building collections.
Here's a clip of the city in action.
Conclusion
The city feature in Casino World has become an important part of the game economy and key metric for driving player engagement. I think this project demonstrates how I strive to put the customer first. In particular here, connecting the players' desire for meaningful social interactions with a feature that was important to the business in a way that provided value to both!