Fenix Design

Role:

Director of Operations

Contribution:

Since I was working in Riot R&D at the time, there is little I can say about the specific projects I was working on, but I can talk about the production and operation methodologies I employed there.

Production Principles:

Every company I have worked for has had some form of principles that defined its identity or culture. Often the reality does not match the rhetoric. For example, at Kixeye, the company had a principle of “Passion over profit.” Still, I saw how certain F2P games were driven by how much a feature could be monetized, regardless of the impact on the player experience.

Don’t get me wrong, making money is critical for a business to be successful and long-lasting, but the company principle was not in line with how it operated. For me, a principle must function as a razor or a heuristic and serve as a tool of evaluation for decision-making.

During my first month at Riot, I worked with my (at the time) small production team to draft our core set of PreProduction Principles we would use to guide our thinking around building processes for the game's development. We first wrote down all the various principles, phrases, or “rules” we had learned in our history of making games. We even look at things outside of games, like Stoic principles. From here, we stack-ranked them into what we thought were the best, most useful rules. This is where most people stop and feel they have a good enough list to work with and then go about honing the language or details, but they miss a crucial step.

Our next step was to actually test our principles. We created a new list of all the sorts of production process-related things we expected to run into during PreProduction, for example:

- Prioritizing work

- Team organization

- Estimating work

- Etc.

We then built a matrix where we asked ourselves whether our principle would have an impact on how we evaluated or made decisions on the listed problem. If yes, the principle might have merit; if not, we dropped it from our list of options. Principles MUST have utility in real-world terms, or they are just words we like to tell ourselves and say much more about who we WANT to be vs. who we actually are or what we actually want to accomplish.

In the end, we settled on the following five core principles:

- Trust through transparency

- Pareto principle or 80/20 rule

- Measured improvement (Kaizen)

- The greater good (Thrive together)

- Consistency/Predictability

You can read much more about these in my blog post on the subject.

Role:

Director of Product

Contribution:

Lead product strategy and delivery for the Claims Business Unit within HiRoad. Built end-to-end solutions for how a customer enters a claim all the way through to the claims agent managing the claim, back to paying out the customer who filed it.

A bit about HiRoad:

Though I have spent 20+ years making video games, the vision and mission of HiRoad were something I could not pass up. HiRoad has a framework of what we call a “triple good” to build a product/service that is good for the customer, good for the business, and good for even the people that were not the customers.

We believe that we can drive change with our choices and that if we give people good data about how their choices (in this case, how they choose to drive) impact themselves and the world around them, they would make better decisions. This would benefit them by saving money and being safer on the road. Benefit us as a business, as we better price risk to probable outcomes, and benefit the ecosystem of drivers, as you being safer on the road literally can save lives.

Design Challenge:

While I was at HiRoad, there were several projects that I worked on, but three main areas were the customer input side, the claims adjuster side, and the technical insurance/integration side of managing a claim. Any one of these is its own deep dive project, so I will just pick one - the technical insurance/integration side of managing a claim. I want to use this one as an example because this is where I learned the most. So instead of explaining everything that went into this project, let’s talk about the broad lessons that can be applied universally to any project.

“Bad news is not like a fine wine; it does not get better with age.” – John Minichiello

It all starts with the above quote from my old boss at HiRoad. John built a culture around bad news rolling uphill, not downhill. I learned to embrace bad news and communicate it early and often. This allowed us to tackle problems before they became big problems.

I have worked on many projects using the classic, GREEN, YELLOW, and RED to indicate project status, but here I learned to add another color to show trending. For example:

GREEN trending YELLOW

YELLOW trending RED

RED trending GREEN

If you look at the first color, you are missing a considerable detail of time and trajectory. The first set of colors is basically a lie, but if you look at the second set of colors, you get the real truth. You get what matters: answering where this project will be in a week, a month, a quarter, etc.

I use this all the time now and can’t believe it took me nearly 20 years to stumble on it.

Role:

Supporting consultant

Contribution:

Before you read any further, I was a consultant on this project, and the person who really ran it was Micah Russo. I want to talk about why this is such an interesting potential area for game development.

Why does this game matter?

Food Truck Fury is not a particularly good game, it is mediocre and relatively derivative, but it is the first of its kind I know about. It is a game that is played via your driving behavior. This may sound crazy for a mobile game considering all the issues around distracted driving, but it is played via your driving behavior, NOT played while you try to drive your 5,000 lb steel murder machine on the road.

What I find interesting, as I have found interesting for the bulk of my professional career, is when there is a new space opening up between games, humans, and technology. In this case, we have cars that are now computers on wheels, connected to smaller computers (mobile phones), and humans who move between both pieces of hardware. Games are simply a constant, as humans have played games since we were hairy apes, as all mammals play games.

What will be, and when will we have, the ‘killer app’ in this new space? Who knows, but I suspect like sooner than later. I am also not suggesting that a great game will sell cars (hardware) as it can for PCs, but I can imagine that the satisfaction of scores of the car manufacturer will go up compared to the baseline. Those satisfaction scores will then likely manifest in reviews and word-of-mouth marketing that does lead to additional car sales. Even that might end up just being a rounding error.

What is likely more interesting and more measurable, possibly meaningful, is the behavior change one could drive. Make a game that encourages people to be safer on the road. Connect it to the driving experience from the moment you enter the car to the excellent score you receive when you park it. Connect it back to your phone with notifications, leaderboards, etc., that remind you of the good scores you are earning. This is what games do exceptionally well, and we are only now scratching the surface of what can be done when we bring these pieces together.

One thing I learned during my time at HiRoad is that it is worth trying to make products and services that are not just good but do good as well.

Role:

General Manager

Contribution:

When I was first hired at EA (Maxis), I was tasked with building a vision for what a AAA SimCity game could be as the second biggest IP for Maxis. This was four years after the last SimCity had shipped to mediocre reviews and substantial technical problems. At the time, Maxis wanted to invest in this legendary IP, but sadly the project never got past early prototyping.

I can’t share much about this, but since it has been over five years since I worked at EA and this vision has long since died, you can at least appreciate the broad strokes of the concept.

Design Challenge:

EA has a long history of production and operational excellence, and the structure is codified in their Gate Process, with the initial gate being a concept thesis and prototype. The design challenge is, what is the concept for this game, and how do we prove it is worth making?

We start by answering these primary questions:

Why? Who? What?

Why should we make this? Who is going to want this? What exactly are we making?

Why?

Lots of reasons. Take back our territory. Maxis once owned this genre. They invented it, but since then, new developers have joined and competed. Maxis could and should take back the leadership position. This is part of Maxis' DNA of inspiring creative play. Big internally owned IP. For EA, a company used to paying licensing fees this is a big win.

Who?

A ton goes into determining who your players are at EA. From segmentation to gender, to age groups, to specific styles of play particular sets of people enjoy. We did all of this work, which I personally LOVE doing, as it gives me a deeper appreciation for the people I believe will truly enjoy this game. That is why we make games in the first place, to bring joy to players like us. In short, we settled on reinventing the builder genre for the Minecraft generation. The players who grew up on Minecraft and all of its creative systems and self-expression. Equally important, this also defined who we were NOT building this game for old-school SimCity players. We acknowledged that to grow the brand; we need to expand the audience wider, not narrow it to a decreasing audience that might have more disposable income and a passion for nostalgia.

What?

And the final question, what the hell does that look like? We wanted to lean hard into creativity by going all in on UGC. This meant we would focus less on crafting a specific bespoke city style and flavor and instead focus on building basically Lego brick-style elements that the player could turn into a city of their own unique design, then share that with others so that they could build on it. We also wanted to focus on a real-time collaborative play space that could be both cooperative and competitive depending on how players want to engage with one another. Finally, we wanted to build best-in-class modding tools to allow players to do things we never even imagined possible.

Secret sauce

The last bit of magic was what I called the secret sauce, that little bit of extra kick that makes a dish that much richer. For me, it was the idea that the people in your city mattered, and you should care about them, grow them and nurture them. SimCity has long been about simulation, but if we continued to push harder and harder to a more accurate simulation, what we lost along the way was the human element. What are cities, if not also the identity of the people that live within them? We needed to show you who lives in your city and give you agency over how they grew and changed over time.

Role:
General Manager

Contribution:
As the GM of The Sims Mobile, I took over the team and project which had been on a very long and tumultuous development path. My responsibilities included solving major leadership changes, getting the project on track to soft launch, redefining the vision for the game to be successful in the marketplace, and to transition the team to operate as a live service. In short, the whole project from soup to nuts.

Design Challenge:
This was one of the most challenging projects I have taken on in my career, but also one of my proudest in terms of turning a tough situation into a success. The issues we faced:

Abrupt leadership change. The previous Creative Director was removed and at the same time, the GM resigned.

Personally, I had zero experience with The Sims intellectual property. I simply never played any of The Sims previously.

Massively bloated team and long dev cycle. When I joined, the team was ~100 people and the game had been in development for more than five years.

Deeply unhappy and stressed out team. The Sims Mobile team had some of the worst team health scores in EA (and that is saying something).

"Focus on people first”

On this particular project, the biggest challenge was in shifting the team away from being told what to do all the time, and instead, working with them to harness their unique expertise. A team of this size, working on a project as complex as this, needed to operate as a series of semi-autonomous units, all working towards the same goal and vision. The first step was teaching by example how to do this. Specific actions included giving out clear ownership, along with expected results and full accountability. Another focus was on calibration. The objective was to move the implicit into the explicit, such that any future questions related to the subject matter would not need escalation or inquiry because the team was fully calibrated. These changes had the greatest impact on turning the project around.

"Make the subjective as objective as possible”

Games are inherently subjective; what is fun? What is cool? Challenging? Etc. My next goal was to get the project into a limited soft launch to switch all debates from subjective theory to objective discussions on what is true and knowable. Previously the team spent years debating about what was going to be important and successful about the project, but my focus was on taking what we had, optimizing the team to react to change, and then iterating as our hypothesis and assumption became concrete realities with real-world data.

"Define an achievable vision of success”

After taking over the project I asked multiple people on the team, from key leaders to individual contributors to strategic partners, “what do they believe the vision for this product is?” As it turned out, I got myriad different answers that often had little coherence and none contained objectively achievable states of success. I would later run a two-day workshop with a cross-section of the team to define a new vision and mission that the full team could understand, believe in and work to actually achieve.

"Improve the process to improve the product”

The dichotomy with this project is that you can go out into the wild too soon and end up testing an inferior product in the market without the ability to adapt. The team had a long history of not hitting dates, so I focused efforts on cutting up the work into small prototypes that would give us the ability to test our designs with the least cost in time and development resources to maximize iteration speed. The process was, to build, measure, and learn, to improve the product by improving the process.

Role:
Vice President of Product

Contribution:
As VP of Product at BetterDoctor, I lead the work on the consumer-facing product and the B2B doctor marketing side as well. I was responsible for vision, schedule, quality, customer support, and team organization.

Design Challenge:
BetterDoctor had been founded on their best-in-class consumer product, (think Yelp+Open Table for doctors), but had recently been hurt by changes in Google’s SEO algorithm. This forced the team and company to pivot and find additional revenue streams to keep the business running.

"Finding product-market fit”

While we continued to support and improve the consumer product, shortly after I joined the team, much of our effort went into our new vision for a doctor marketing business that leveraged our own painful lessons learned about SEO. We quickly built a prototype of our vision using one of our current clients as test data. We found that we could dramatically improve a doctor’s search ranking in a matter of days, helping them be much more effective in their local marketing.

"Test, own, and scale”

Once we knew that we could make something of value to our doctor clients, we set about two parallel tracks, creating our own unique platform for building our product on and scaling up the business across more clients and larger clients. All of this was done while continuing to test our hypotheses about what our clients needed vs was the consumers wanted. Within in six months, we had a profitable revenue stream that supplemented the existing consumer product and put the company on a path to full profitability.

Role:
Executive Producer

Contribution:
As Executive Producer on Eternity Warriors 3 and Eternity Warriors 4, I had to balance my focus on running a healthy live game for EW3 and defining a new future for that IP in EW4. The plan was to use the built-in audience of EW3 to test new concepts and ideas for EW4.

Design Challenge:
EW3 was a solidly successful action RPG for Glu Mobile, but we want to make EW4 a much more successful game by making it a deeper experience, more accessible to a wider audience, and solving for the disparity between eastern and western play patterns.

"Focus on personalization and customization”

One of the main areas we wanted to focus on was broadening the value a player got from the game experience. In EW3, the main drive for the player was simply power. They got more power and they performed better. We wanted to make it about, “peacocking” (showing off to other players) and variation in play style. Looking at examples like League of Legends, Team Fortress 2, and Hearthstone, we see great examples of competitive style play mixed with rich personalization of your own avatar AND the ability to play different roles/classes in ever-changing ways. Both these additions lead to multiple paths of value for a player to chase and feel happy along the way.

"Gatcha optimization”

The main form of monetization in EW3 was a fairly standard Gatcha system of loot boxes, but we uncovered a critical insight while doing a deep dive into the data. What we discovered turned into an almost, “Duh!” moment, but it turned out that even though the loot table was random, players who received a high-powered weapon on a piece of armor for their first (free) loot box drop, were 270% and 190% more like to monetize and retain than any other drop, regardless of higher rarity value. The point is that players value what they understand (weapons and armor are very salient), but also what can show immediate utility.

"Get serious about social”

EW3 was pretty much a single-player experience and though you could see other people in the town/lobby space, there was no deep social connection either in co-op play or PvP. Our goal was to invest in both these areas and even into clans to harness the power of strong social connections to keep RPG players together in groups for years. This has been proven many times over in games like WoW, LoL, Destiny 1 & 2, etc.

"Loot boxes 2.0”

Another area I dove into, was improving loot boxes in general. Since they are very similar to a standard slot machine, how can we take lessons learned from modern slot machine design and apply those lessons to Loot Boxes? We looked at adding the concept of, “loss disguised as win” or LDW to increase the positive feeling of opening a loot box regardless of the value of the payout. We also looked at adding the concept of, “near hit” and a new concept of, “near miss” to encourage players to spend more on repeat box opening. You can read more about this in a recent Wired article, “... research has shown that near-misses on a slot machine are especially intoxicating for compulsive gamblers, leading to a spike in activity in the dopaminergic midbrain”

Role:
Executive Producer and creator

Contribution:
As Executive Producer on TOME - Immortal Arena, I was responsible for all aspects of the product, including design vision, tech stack, project plan, P&L, monetization model, and final delivery. All development was done by the hand-picked, rockstar team at KIXEYE.

Design Challenge:
"The MOBA for everyone else”. This was one of our design principles for TOME - Immortal Arena. We wanted to build a MOBA from the ground up that would make the genre far more accessible to a wider audience of people who love games in general, not just competitive RTS players. This was also a series of firsts for KIXEYE including the first 3D game. First MOBA for KIXEYE. First (sort of) fully server authoritative.

"The MOBA for everyone else”

What this meant was creating something that was hyper-accessible on all fronts. We focused on having short play sessions, targeting 15 mins or less. The vision was, "two on your lunch break", we even used the phrase, "the lunchtime MOBA". We also tried to get players in a match fast, with one click to start a match, with most matches made in less than two mins. We also had an ace in the hole, since we didn't have any client download.

"Always able to make progress”

Since I was originally hired at KIXEYE to make an MMO RPG, a genre I have a huge passion for, I wanted to infuse RPG mechanics into TOME to give players a better sense of progress in the game. The core design principle was, "Players should always be five mins away from something". The player should feel they are very close to the next level, ability, Relic, Blessing, etc, and be presented with explicit progress and success. One of the challenges with a PVP-only game is a player's only source of feedback is their win/loss record in general, (by design), it ends up at 50%

"Not a League of Legends clone”

The team loves LoL and many people still play it often, but we felt it is not a zero-sum game - we don't have to, "beat" League of Legends to "win". 32 million people watched LoL on eSports, and nearly all of them are not highly competitive ranked players and could be enjoying TOME as well as LoL. This was also why I chose to tackle 3v3 instead of 5v5 since I felt it was an uncharted design space.

"Build an IP that has legs"

For me, the two most important tasks as a producer are 1) Creating lasting and emotionally rich IP and 2) Building passionate, hard-working, efficient teams. If you can build a strong IP, then you can make many games from it. You build a great team and there is no limit to what you and they can produce.

Lastly, we wanted to change the perception of what a “Facebook” game could be and set a new quality bar for browser-based gaming. I could not be more proud of this work and the team I had the privilege to build and work for.

Role:
Executive Producer (supporting)

Contribution:
After just being hired at KIXEYE, (it was actually called Casual Collective at the time), I was set up to learn the ropes of Free to Play by supporting Dave Scott who was then starting work on War Commander. My role on Backyard Monsters was that of a Product Manager / Project Manager.

Design Challenge:
Put the team on a path to work more collaboratively and iterate faster. This was far less about changing the game, and more about changing the way the team worked.

Backyard Monsters was already a fairly successful game and were the foundation that allowed KIXEYE to develop Battle Pirates. When I joined the team I became part of a passionate group who knew their product and consumer well, and were able to release quickly, but had a ton of churn in development with way too many things to do, but not a clear priority of which to do and why.

The first step was putting the team on Kanban as our development methodology (we would later switch to agile as the team grew in size). This illuminated all sorts of issues around workflow including issues with ownership, testing, spec documentation (there was none), and communication.

I remember my first stand-up meeting, where I explained the rules, (say what you did the day before, what you are working on now, any blockers), I went first then Dave. Dave went through the flow as normal, then told Kevin and Eric what they needed to be working on, leaving Eric and Kevin to repeat what Dave just said. This showcased a huge flaw in how the team was working because everyone was waiting for what Dave wanted and no one was empowered to execute on their own using their best judgment.

Once people could execute on their own, the next major step was establishing what they needed to execute against. I established a spec template and made sure all features both large and small were properly specified with wireframes. Wireframes was another fun project since I could easily get into Flash and pull out all the assets, so I built a stencil set in Omnigraffle which allowed anyone on the team to build full, perfectly accurate UI mocks in minutes. That stencil set would be used all the way until the game was finally put into maintenance mode nearly three years later.

My last best action on BYM was hiring Ryan Sindledecker to take over as Product Manager and watching him help run the game smoothly and efficiently for the next two-plus years.

Role:

Executive Producer (supporting)

Contribution:

Once I joined KIXEYE, (it was actually called Casual Collective at the time), I was set up to learn the ropes of Free to Play by supporting Dave Scott, who was then starting work on War Commander. My role was that of a Product Manager / Project Manager.

Design Challenge:

Follow up KIXEYE’s successful Battle Pirates with another RTS game that pushes the genre further adding in individual unit control and synchronous battles.

At the time War Commander had just started development and the team was just Dave Scott, another engineer, and myself. The plan at the time was to get War Commander out in a few months which I quickly realized was not going to happen. One of my favorite moments was when I asked to read the GDD for War Commander and was told there wasn't one, nor a concept doc. In fact, there were no words whatsoever written down documenting the game. I knew instantly what my first job was.

The main thing I focused on in those early days was processes. Though KIXEYE had made two great products in Back Yard Monsters and Battle Pirates, they were not set up to be able to repeat those successes. I started off by documenting everything, getting the whole company to move over to Google Docs. Then went to the task of building their first specification templates, which they still use today. Next was implementing Scrum on Back Yard Monsters and War Commander. Lastly, I established proper UX discipline, making sure we did wireframes and user testing as well as data-driven development. 

I had the good fortune to help get War Commander started on the right track and got to enjoy seeing the new people hired to the team build upon this foundation, making War Commander another great success for KIXEYE. The only thing better than that was seeing the new best practices take hold and watching those who were once learning become the teachers.

Role:

Creative Director

Contribution:

All visual design, UX work, and Flash development

Design Challenge:

Take the successful Blancspot iPhone experience and bring it to the iPad, taking advantage of the larger screen and existing interaction paradigm of the iPad platform. Created a fully interactive Flash prototype to show off how the iPhone experience would be transferred to this new platform.

The iPad version of Blancspot takes advantage of the very large screen of the iPad and really makes the Blancspot cinematic experience shine. A large, rich visual world sets Blancspot apart from all other news applications running on the iPad.

ReaderMode on the iPad uses a unique two-scrolling column approach that allows users to simultaneously read the news story and see relevant Tweets on the same screen. All of this is overlaid on the image to still keep the user connected with the strong visual that prompted their interaction in the first place.

Redesigned the Facebook sharing UX to be in line with standard iPad navigation style taking advantage of modal windows to focus the user on a singular action, but without taking them totally out of context from their previous state.

Role:

Creative Director

Contribution:

All visual design and UX work

Awards/Recognitions:

iPhone App of the week (Sept 6th - 12th 2010)

Design Challenge:

Create a new way of experiencing news on mobile devices, integrating imagery, audio, motion, and social networking. Did all concept, design work, and would ultimately lead the development team that built this iPhone app.

This is the signature cinematic experience of the Blancspot app built with a focus on a singular large image animated with a Ken Burns effect, set to contemporary music curated for each news channel. This is the starting point of the experience, automatically dropping the user into a stream of events happening in real-time with information about their friend’s activity integrated into the headline bar.

The Dashboard is the aggregate view of news, displaying all news channels for Blancspot, including the unique personal channels - Suggested, Friend's Activity, and My Channel. Each personal channel offers a unique way of individual news consumption. "Suggested" news stories are stories your personal network has specifically recommended to you, "Friend's Activity" is news stories your friends are viewing currently, and "My Channel" is both a personal news browser history, as well as stories set to be read later by the user.

After tapping on the headline bar in PlayMode, the user is taken to ReaderMode to view the news story of interest. Here the user can read, and view Tweets related to this event or share via email, Twitter, Facebook, or Blancspot's unique 'Suggest' feature.

Role:

Producer

Contribution:

As the producer of Reset Generation, I was responsible for all aspects of design and development. All development was done by the amazing team at RedLynx.

Design Challenge:

Reset Generation was designed to be an entirely new kind of mobile game that connected Mobile to PC gamers in a seamless multiplayer experience. The vision was to create a game that was inviting to play and unfairly addictive. These two points would be our guiding design principles as we set out to make a game about games, a unique homage to all things gaming. This game would go on to win numerous awards to accolades including a 10/10 from Pocket Gamer.

The above logo for the game was inspired by old pixel games like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender, Adventure, etc. The name was inspired by a Salon.com article about this group of kids, now adults, who grew up playing video games and how that has altered their behavior.

Reset Generation, is bright, colorful, and joyfully celebratory of all things video games. Truly designed for a mobile user, with a focus on one-thumb gameplay with an average play-session length of ten minutes. The two major design challenges in creating a mobile multiplayer game are; how do you allow players to quickly get into a multiplayer match and second, how do you keep all players interested and active for the entire game without wanting to quit part way through, especially if they are losing?

The first problem was solved by creating an entirely new matching system for mobile and the second by creating a “Rubberband Effect”, such that even when down a player always had a chance to come back and steal victory from the jaws of defeat.

Reset Generation was overflowing with game references including, princesses, heroes, castles, blocks, cannons, weapons (BFGP - Biggest Freaking Gun Possible), etc. Though the mechanics were also designed to acknowledge games of the past, the main design of these was to allow for a fast passed tactical game that would work well on mobile and PC without affording an unfair advantage to the PC gamers who would have larger screens and massive network bandwidth, with little to no latency. Turns were resolved some asynchronously and some were synchronized to keep a pass that was active, for a tactical game, but not too fast for a mobile game, which, at the time, was not well suited for high activity given the poor rocker input of most devices.

Besides the Pocket Gamer award, Reset Generation would earn recognition from myriad sources. 

Evergeek (4.75 / 5)
"The age of mobile gaming second-citizenship has ended with the opening of a multicolored, multiplayer, multilayered can of online, cross-platform, old-school-inspired Whoop-Ass."

MTV
"I highly recommend you check out "Reset Generation" (available free here); it's an immensely addictive combo of "Tetris" and "Advance Wars" and only takes a few minutes to pick up."

PCWorld
"I've been playing Reset Generation--the most cleverly designed, most addictive, and most hard-to-quickly-describe puzzle game in ages."

Role:
Producer and Art Director

Contribution:
Working with Themis Group, I led the art direction for the game/website

Design Challenge:
Create a framework for the web version of the Reset Generation game to be housed in, that also gave the user quick access to specific gaming features - Rankings, Player Page, Player of the Day, Trophies, News and Event, etc.

The main goal for the home page was to create a comfortable place for users to play Reset Generation. The secondary goals for the site where to promote the game in general as well as promote N-Gage in general. One of the interesting things we did to support this, was embedded the game widget in a Nokia device frame that could be changed on the backend to promote whatever was the latest N-Gage compatible device.

Rankings was bay far the most popular feature on N-Gage and Reset Generation would have some of the most active leaderboards of all N-Gage games. To avoid user having to sift through tons of boards and stats, we limited the number of stats we tracked for rankings, but added a "Belt" system that allowed players to earn belts if they were the current leader in a specific event i.e. Princess Rescued, best specific hero, etc. This allowed user to have unique reward, but not leave it locked to one player, like the top five in ranking boards tend to be.

Since Reset Generation was built to be a multiplayer game, Player Pages were critical to the success of the game. In addition to the expect features of stats, belts, achievements and hero art, we added a replay system that allowed users to watch all their past matches or the matches of others to learn tips and tricks on how to improve their game play. This was a first of it's kind for a mobile game.

Role:
Art Director

Contribution:
All visual design, UX, and flash development work

Design Challenge:
Create an international (translated into 11 languages) marketing site for the new Virtua Fighter 4 game franchise that showed off the new characters, stages, and fighting styles. Even though this site was designed in 2002, over 8 years ago, it is still in use today - www.virtua-fighter-4.com

Clearly dated by today’s standards of web design, this site, like many at the time contains the now ultra annoying "Skip Intro" button, but at the time, motion graphics on the web was something to actually sit through and enjoy.

The website's landing page was intentionally sparse to create maximum visual space for the game art and not add any additional elements to detract from rich character art. The site was divided into three core areas - Characters, Fighting Styles, and Stages, since each Fighter had a unique style and a specific stage. The user could then cross-navigate these areas, for example learning about a specific fighting style - Vale Tudo would lead the user to Vanessa, where they would learn she fights on the Harbor stage.

The art direction and style established here would go on to be used in the follow-up game of the franchise - Virtua Fight 4 Evo and also used in print and other ad campaigns. The site was very well received by the notoriously picky AM2 development team, headed by the well-known game designer Yu Suzuki.

Role:
Head of Concept and Design

Contribution:
Led a team of Visual and UX designers on this project.

Design Challenge:
Ovi Organizer is Nokia’s solution for social and personal planning. It was designed to address the issue, discovered from internal research with IDEO, that only about 3% of users actually use the calendar application on the device, even though nearly all Nokia devices had a native calendar application. The goal was to figure out why users were not taking advantage of the calendar and meet those underserved needs.

In early 2008 IDEO was tasked by Nokia to research how users schedule and organize their personal lives. The research was done in five countries with 20 people providing in-depth access to their lives allowing the researchers to learn a great deal about these people’s radically different methods of organizing their lives. The main findings are - Plans are often not concrete, people would write down things like, “Go shopping”, or “Try a new restaurant”.

Communication is coordination - what we do and where we do it are often highly influenced by who we communicate with. Lastly, pretty much every person’s calendar/note system involved lots of duplication as they moved from written notes to digital communication tools. The solutions for this product covered nearly every Nokia platform, PC Web, Mobile Web, S60 Devices, S40 Devices, and the new Linux OS - Maemo.

Role:
Head of Concept and Design

Contribution:
As Head of Concept and Design, I worked with Mippin development team to create this web app.

Design Challenge:
How does Nokia dramatically increase the overall volume of applications available in the new Ovi App Store? The Ovi Application Wizard was designed to do just that by enabling companies and individuals to quickly and easily create mobile RSS applications for their content and publish it to the Ovi Store. 

Working with an external company - Mippin, we created a web tool, that makes it very easy to create a mobile RSS application customized to a company’s brand colors and logos and have it run on multiple devices, from large-screen touch devices to small-screen scroll and select phones.

The web experience is broken down into four main steps:

1) Add an RSS feed.

2) Customize the look and feel to suit your personal taste or the organization you work for.

3) Add mobile advertising if desired (not pictured since it was optional). 

4) Download assets (zipped up) to upload and publish on the Ovi Store. 

After an application has been created, a user can return to their personal dashboard and get detailed analytics on their application, including downloads and usage patterns. When I worked on this product it was in Beta and currently, it is released. The latest version can be accessed here. 

This application would go on to win Nokia Innovation and Excellence Award, which sounds like a cheap internal-only award, but it is handed down by the CEO of Nokia himself and include a 30,000 Euro award for the team.

Role:
Head of Concept and Design

Contribution:
Led a four-person team to design a new games experience for Games on Maemo (Linux device)

Design Challenge:
Evolve the N-Gage games platform, taking what was successful (socially connected games) and bringing that to the new Nokia Maemo (Linux) platform. The design challenge included building a fully new UI and UX for a platform that itself was not finished, creating a moving target for the design team to hit. An additional goal was to find holes and limitations in the new platform that the various services would need to resolve before the final release. Unfortunately, games would be cut as a key service for this device, and much of this would be shelved, awaiting a new device. 

This project would last four "Sprints" (not true agile development), each lasting about two weeks. During each iteration, the design was simplified to shorten development time and to align with both the overall device UX and the other Nokia Services (Messaging, Music, Imagery, etc). The above image was made using a new technique for the team, (a variation on the paper prototype), hand drawing UI on stickies cut to screen aspect ratio. This allowed us to quickly manipulate order and arrangement to iterate on the design with user feedback. New concepts could be made rapidly and inserted into the design and tested with users.

This was the first wireframe done to align the Games service UX with the device UX. As we iterated on the design we removed extraneous features and improved consistency within our own service and consistency with the other services. We also found holes in the overall UX of the device, specifically with how native, vs. downloaded apps were to be handled. These lead to significant changes to the device UX paradigm.

This final iteration was done to further align with device requirements and other services to create a completely seamless experience for our service with others. At this stage, we were meeting with our own development team to size the amount of development work this would be and preparing for building interactive Flash prototypes to be tested with users in short user research studies. Unfortunately, at this stage, the games service was pulled as a key selling point for this device, and the device itself was delayed. 

In designing our portrait solution for Games on Maemo, we chose to use a combination of limiting data visualization (Game library goes from 9 to 6 displayed games) and curated stacking of elements, (Games above social info). We felt this gave us the best balance of information and consistency.

Role:
Head of Concept and Design

Contribution:
Led a team of UX and visual designers to maintain and update the device's UI

Design Challenge:
The N-Gage Application was the main experience for the service where a user would spend the vast majority of their time, playing games, finding new games, and chatting with friends.

Designed to address the shortcomings of the original N-Gage Hardware platform and to expand the experience to multiple S60 devices. This would be Nokia’s first move into the service industry, challenging its internal system of just building devices. The original design and concept were done by IDEO and handed off to Nokia for development and release. I was brought in at this time to analyze what was implemented vs. what was designed and to prioritize new feature development.

While working on this, we expanded the number of supported devices from 3 to 20 and dramatically, download, purchases, and user activity (rating/reviewing games, chatting, playing online.

Role:
Producer

Contribution:
As the producer of Reset Generation, I worked with the Marketing team to create this campaign.

Design Challenge:
Reset Generation needed a marketing campaign theme that captured the soul of the product so we created the concept - For the Love of Gaming. This fits perfectly for the unique game that was about games.

For this marketing campaign to work we needed to take our low-resolution, 8bit pixel-inspired art and make it scalable for print and other large format usages. Before we did this though, we had to go through the process of converting our individual concept artist's work, (another marketing story for Reset Generation), into a unified art style of the game.

In the above image, the amazing work of Christian Gosset is made consistent with the game's own style. This work would be further refined into 8-bit pixel art and then finally into print-ready vector work for marketing needs. 

This evolution of styles was how the original design principles were applied and a consistent visual language was maintained throughout the design, development, and final marketing phase of the product.

Reset Generation would be featured at the PAX Event in Seattle, GDC, and other trade shows. The marketing assets would include additional items like an album for 8Bit Weapon and a full-function multiplayer Reset Generation arcade cabinet.

Role:
Art Director

Contribution:
All visual design and UX work.

Design Challenge:
To create the first-ever massively multiplayer mobile online game - MMMOG. Pocket Kingdom was designed to be a deep RPG, including creating an army, crafting gear and units, supported by an online auction, upgrading your castle, and doing battle against other players from around the world. This game would go on to win numerous awards, including 4.5/5 from Gamespy.com and 9/10 from 1up.com

Pocket Kingdom is truly unique and truly exceptional. You'll be hard-pressed to find a more satisfying, habit-forming game experience anywhere. It does for N-Gage Arena what Halo 2 did for Xbox Live ...

-- GameSpy.com

On a technical level, one of the huge challenges with Pocket Kingdom was the very small screen resolution - 176 x 208 pixels and the 12-bit color palette that only allowed for 1-bit alpha channels. This was some seriously old-school programming and I had the great fortune of working with industry legend Ed Rotberg of Battle Zone and other game fame.

One major distinction of Pocket Kingdom to the genre of RPGs was the breaking of the "fourth wall" in videogames, by having a player's units speak in L33t speak, like online gamers at the time, including, "Pwn!", "Grief" and "OMG". This really helped the game stand out from the crowd of generic RPG fodder. 

One of the secondary design challenges was dealing with information overload for such data-rich areas as crafting, unit upgrading, and party management. All of these areas were stat-heavy and lacked a connection to the actual units and items they were meant to represent. By simply adding small images of the units similar to the battle screens the player had a much better sense of the relationship between the unit and its related data. 

Because of a relatively short development cycle, we were not able to fully overhaul the existing IA for the game menu, so instead, we created a workaround of a personal fairy character who explained the various features of the game as the player accessed them. This character also acted as comic relief and set the tone of the tongue in cheek style of humor the game became famous for.

Role:
Design Lead

Contribution:
Did all visual design and UX work

Design Challenge:
Update the existing N-Gage Arena UI for the next N-Gage hardware, code-named "Antares". The shift in design was to take over the new "Active Idle" screen that allowed users quick access to frequently used applications. This would bring socially connected features to the forefront of the user experience, dramatically increasing user activity. This was done to address the user research that found many people were not finding the N-Gage game app on their devices, since Symbian S60 at the time had a very poor UX with many folders and apps spread throughout the device and variable between different markets and regions.

One of the key challenges of this platform was the limited screen (176 x 208 pixels) and the limited color space (12-bit color palette). So the focus was on updating not just the visuals, but also where and how the user would access the socially connected N-Gage features that made up N-Gage Arena.

The above screens show what accessing the N-Gage arena would look like. This is a variation on what was the current N-Gage Arena UI since we wanted to do a visual update, but not a whole new IA for the app. This was to limit the development cost and shorten the overall time frame to make it to market.

The UI is cleaned up and modernized compared to the previous Arena UI, but many of the icon metaphors and basic structural elements would remain the same in function.

One of the key pieces of this concept was also modernizing the UI of the device itself with the image on the right showing what the basic Calendar app would look like compared to the Arena UI elements. They would be color-coded by function, but they would not have a completely different UI visual design as they had in the past. See Arena UI on N-Gage Classic.

Role:
Art Director

Contribution:
Did all visual design and UX work.

Design Challenge:
Created a unique web experience for the SegaSports franchise for the new Dreamcast platform. This design was to be built on top of the existing Sega Dreamcast web experience, but also take on a new look for SegaSports. One of the key challenges of this project was to build a web interface for the Dreamcast browser which limited resolution (standard TV, including title safe area) and input via Dreamcast control, instead of a mouse.

All the SegaSports games for the Dreamcast would have online features, nearly all with multiplayer, which was unheard of at the time, so each game would have access to the SegaSports web experience from the Dreamcast console, allowing players to issue challenges, view rankings, enter tournaments and learn more about the other SegaSports games.

Research data showed the user generally bought more than one SegaSports game so a key feature of the site was to learn about other SegaSports titles as well as to keep the user coming back for info about games currently in development. This was back in an area of dial-up access speeds so having insight into game development was nearly unheard of at the time. 

Since SegaSports titles were some of the first games to have online multiplayer, a whole new system for player challenges had to be created, including a web interface for issuing and receiving them. 

To help grow the Sega Dreamcast community regularly scheduled tournaments were held and run by our community managers. Players could sign up for and check their standings in all open tournaments.

The SegaSports site would later undergo a major redesign, making the site far easier to update and become a much more timely place for news and events as the overall pace for internet development and information increased. See the SegaSports redesign project.

Role:
Art Director

Contribution:
Did all visual design, UX work, and Flash development

Design Challenge:
Take an unknown IP, that is really a tech demo and make a marketing site on no budget from a marketing team that could care less. Outtrigger was in some ways a total dream project for me since after working on so many high-profile IP projects I now had one that no one was interested in, giving me free rein to do whatever I felt like and in this case what I felt like doing was push my own skills of Flash, 3DS Max, and Illustrator to their limits.

Outtrigger was really more of a tech demo for SNAP - Sega Network Application Package, which would become Sega network middleware running in games on the Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox platforms. It would also be purchased by Nokia and rolled into the N-Gage and Java games platforms for Nokia.

For Outtrigger we took the wafer-thin storyline of the game about a futuristic international counter-terrorism force called, "Interforce" and imagined what that company's website would look like. I created a full 3D virtual character including using an early text-to-speech tool to give him a voice and communicate with the user as the navigated the site. Multiple movies were rendered and randomly assigned to have our virtual guide talk, look around, blink and smile.

Outtrigger was all about style over substance, there were multiple UX paradigms and gratuitous flash animations, just about everything one does not do today in modern website design, but at the time, if I could make it move, it did - nothing was static on the Outtrigger website.

The Media section of the site was the most conventional, using the main window space for viewing all content, screens, wallpaper, and movies.

In a nod to Charlie's Angels, I added a character selector that randomly morphed through silhouettes of each character and would show full-color renders on mouseover.

After selecting a character, the user would be taken to the bio page, including information about weapons, extra images, and how to play effectively with each character.

Outtrigger was not a particularly successful game, but it allowed me to further develop my technical skills so I could put those talents to good use on more important work in the future.

Role:
Art Director

Contribution:
Did all visual design, UX work, and Flash development

Design Challenge:
Jet Grind Radio was one of the first titles to ever use a cell-shaded style which is now commonplace in many games. Due to this totally new style of 3D game, I designed a whole new way of interacting with a flash website, by having a fully 3D world, cell-shaded, for the user to explore. This would be an unheard-of challenge, considering the very new platform of Flash in Oct of 2000.

During the concept phase with the marketing team for Jet Grind Radio, we decided to create a full 3D garage based on the actual hangout of the characters in the game. This room was built using 3DS Max and would be used to create the full 3D navigation. Everything was rendered in 3D creating vector outlines that were then imported into Flash a sequence of images. These sequences would be broken up and then colored, frame by frame in Flash. Objects were purposely simplified to keep the frame rate high as the user navigated the site.

Users could navigate the site by clicking on any object and they would be taken directly to the object moving through the three-dimensional space of the site. This met with many positive reviews by users, since a dramatic departure from the current web design.

As users navigated the room they learned about the game's characters, the history of graffiti, the game’s features and even were able to play a mini-game by picking up spray cans littered throughout the space and tagging, (spay painting), the evil characters from the game to unlock additional content on the site.

When reading content the user literally dove right into the content zooming in and reading the information in a more traditional 2D format.

Jet Grind Radio would be a critical success and lead to the follow-up title of Jet Set Radio Future, another critically successful title.

From Wikipedia:

The game was received exceedingly well from online sources and magazines. Many have praised the style of the game as the matching soundtrack with up-tempo music. Critics also applauded the simplistic "pick-up and play" arcade-style gameplay. The lowest review received was a 70% rating (3.5 out of 5) from Independent Gamer. IGN gave the game a 9.6 rating but criticized the camera control, saying, "You'll spend weeks thinking 'Why don't all games look like this?'. Then you'll spend a month wondering why the camera wasn't fixed in the development." The lack of multiplayer was also criticized.

Role:
Art Director

Contribution:
All visual design work

Design Challenge:
Create compelling marketing posters and magazine ads for Sega's new gaming ISP - SegaNet. These ads needed to promote the brand new ISP (the first of its kind), the new games available to play, and emphasis the multiplayer aspect of the ISP. 

As one of the few designers with a background in traditional print, I was called on to design a series of posters and magazine ads that would run as part of the first marketing campaign for SegaNet. This ad and others I designed would eventually be run in gamer magazines, as well as large format posters used at E3 and GDC.

Role:
Art Director

Contribution:
All visual design, UX, and flash development work

Design Challenge:
Design a website for Sega’s new business-to-business unit that would be simple and clean, but still showcase the polished marketing websites the Sega.com web team had become known for.

The design was an exercise in minimalism, as I had done many an over-the-top game marketing flash site before. I still chose to use Flash for this site, but only because I felt I could use movement as a didactic tool to help users learn to use the site better. Unfortunately, the still imagery here does not do this concept justice.

The site was broken down into three main zones, main nav, sub nav main image area, and main content/text area. The IA for the site was fairly straightforward and was able to accomplish everything the site needed to do with these four zones.

The one drawback that this website created was that at the time, Flash skills were not commonplace among junior designers, so when the site was ready to be put into maintenance mode, it was hard to find a designer who was junior enough, but also competent enough in Flash to make minor updates. Of course, these seem silly today with the pool of talent knowing Flash.

Drawing of Henry VI, Part 1, Act IV

Role:
Artist

Contribution:
Pencil drawing on bristol art board.

Design Challenge:
No real challenge here, this was just personal work.

Since this is a portfolio of all my previous work, I have decided to add some of my drawing work as well. This particular piece was done during my first year in college while I was studying life drawing. This was not actually a class assignment, just a personal piece I wanted to do based on the book I was reading at the time, William Shakespeare's, Henry VI. This is the point where Young Talbot is killed in front of Old Talbot.

Come, come and lay him in his father's arms:
My spirit can no longer bear these harms.
Soldiers, adieu! I have what I would have,
Now my old arms are young John Talbot's grave.

- William Shakespeare

Note - This is not a good presentation of this work, since I had to take a photograph of it since it was already framed. This work was done long before scanners were household objects.

Role:
Artist

Contribution:
Inks on art board.

Design Challenge:
No real challenge here, this was just personal work.

Little known fact, while I was at Penn State University I was training for the Olympics in Sabre Fencing. While on the team we would go on to win 3 NCAA Championships and during my three years there, I would do a number of fencing t-shirts, posters, flyers, etc. These were some of the first, "Real Client" work that I did.

This piece would be used on a poster and a t-shirt, but I would redesign it the following year. One thing that I chose to do on this version was to make it appeal to female fencers since the team was growing at the time and our female fencing in the US in general was doing much better internationally than men's fencing.

The original was done with inks, including a technique that used inks like watercolors to do the wide strokes. The final piece was then scanned in, then the text was added in Illustrator.

The second piece would be used on a poster and a t-shirt, but I would redesign it the following year.

The original was done with charcoals, scanned in then text added in Illustrator.