Background
Flowplay developed Seven Seas Casino, a browser-based social casino game. It was a spin-off of Flowplay's previous game, Casino World. This cruise-themed casual casino has players voyage on a cruise ship, visiting ports across the globe with exclusive shopping and gaming content. Notably, Seven Seas lacked Casino World's "City" feature, a lightweight meta mechanic enabling players to buy buildings and construct their own casino cities that generate daily rewards. The more buildings a player owned, the more coins and prizes they collected, making the city feature a vital economic component in Casino World.
Our challenge was to develop a similarly engaging and rewarding meta-game feature for Seven Seas Casino.
Research & Discovery
This feature would be aimed at our current user base, and we thought it should integrate cohesively with the "cruise" theme of the platform. I developed three distinct concepts, each designed to encourage micro-transactions that would boost daily rewards and enhance players' sense of progression and status.
My initial sense was that the concept 3, the escort ship, would work best. It would fit well with the presentation of the cruise ship and map of the port that players are visiting. Working with the marketing and art team, we surveyed over 100 of our active players to find out which of the above concepts they preferred. The result was overwhelmingly in favor of concept 2, the fishing game. With this data, I dropped my old presumptions and switched directions. I'm glad I did! The fishing game has a ton of personality with the amazing fish our artists created.
Process
Working closely with stakeholders, I initiated the process by wire-framing the initial flow. Integrating it into an existing game posed various challenges. We needed to ensure it was compatible with the current system, notifications, and navigation, while maintaining balance with other game elements.
The core idea revolved around players capturing and leveling up fish using a unique in-game currency we called "Fishin' Chips". As a fish species progressed in levels, it would offer increasingly larger daily rewards, akin to the building mechanics in Casino World.
Our initial plan was for players to pay to cast a fishing line. However, after discussion and internal review, we decided that it was more engaging to let players catch a fish for free but require a waiting period before collecting it. Players still had the option to pay to skip the timer.
As players caught more instances of a fish species, that species accrued experience points. Once enough experience points were earned, players could pay to level up their fish. Higher-level fish, in turn, provided more substantial daily rewards.
I worked with the artists, art director, and ui designer to develop the art, background and ui style.
Refinement
I iterated multiple rounds of Figma prototypes to refine the interactions and navigation. Here is one early example:
Along with my junior designer, I created ui assets and layouts. Here is an example of explorations I did on laying out the fish tile. We wanted to showcase the artwork, name, level, rarity, and experience status of the fish. The tile had a special state where it indicated the fish was ready to level up. I wanted the information to be legible and organized.
Final tile design
I felt strongly that we needed a design system for organizing and viewing the fish players collected. A master view with the tile grid and a detail view displaying the qualities of a fish species. This detail list needed to include multiple states. One state to showcase an instance of the fish which a player had just caught, another to show the details of a fish in a player's collection, and a third state to show when a fish species was ready to level up.
Here is a more refined Figma click-through prototype, using the polished assets for stakeholders to review and the developer to use in implementing the design.
Conclusion
I think this project demonstrates the traits of ownership (thinking long-term and acting on behalf of the entire company), following my instincts (sticking up for certain ideas that I felt strongly about such as the fish collection system), and being curious and ready to learn (happily changing directions when new data was collected), and finally, delivering results.
After Treasure Fishing's initial launch statistical reports were promising. It soon accounted for 10% of Seven Seas Casino's total Gem (the purchased currency) spend. Plans are to continue to refine and develop the feature.
After Treasure Fishing's initial launch statistical reports were promising. It soon accounted for 10% of Seven Seas Casino's total Gem (the purchased currency) spend. Plans are to continue to refine and develop the feature.
