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Responsibilities

• Led the design of Chrome Valley Customs, driving innovation from initial concept through to successful global release and beyond, delivering a desirable car restoration fantasy to a casual audience.
• Collaborated and helped manage cross-functional teams through the entire game development lifecycle, from ideation to launch of numerous key features, resulting in a successful ‘puzzle and decorate’ car restoration core, performant car fantasy live ops and mini-games to increase regular customers. 
• Collaborated with leadership to develop the game’s strategic roadmap by gathering audience and team input, conducting research, and analyzing player data for key decisions. Presented strategies to management for feedback, refinement and alignment. 
• Mentored and guided junior designers, fostering a collaborative environment that led to improved workflow and successful features delivered with improvement in KPIs.

Our Mission

Our mission is to marry a proven casual core to a broad, accessible theme and deliver a desirable player fantasy through an engaging meta that can be played for years.
We aim to deliver on this mission by channelling the fantasy of car customisation and restoration into a game that pairs a rewarding Project Makeover-inspired meta with a supercharged match-3 switcher.

Game Overview

From sympathetic restorations to outrageous customisations, this game has it all. 

Indulge in a huge variety of car restoration projects, make each project your own, and gain a real sense of satisfaction when your work is done. Meet your garage crew and get to know the ins and outs of the restoration business. Journey through different locations and garages, discovering the story behind every car and its owner. 

Play through thousands of bold, responsive and delightful match-3 switcher levels,  salvaging items and collecting money to faithfully restore cars to their former glory or make them bigger, bolder and better than ever.

The market opportunity for this game is created by our choice of theme. The top car themed games have driven 257 million downloads over the past 5 years in the US and Europe (for comparison, Home Renovation games generated around 270m downloads in the same period). However, the automobile theme is currently dominated by racing games. We therefore believe auto-restoration is a valuable and unexplored territory in which to position ourselves.

The auto restorer theme tested well in market research. We achieved 10% clickthrough (CTR), 1.4 times the CTR of our benchmark (Loved Up) in the same test. Conversion on a Storemaven app store reached 51%, also on a par with Loved Up.

As noted above, the auto-themed game market is dominated by racing games. We also wanted to check that respondents to a restoration themed ad wouldn’t still be expecting a racing game so we surveyed them. Overwhelmingly they preferred the restoration activity to racing.

Feature Development and Strategy Process

As part of the product leadership team to decide and agree on the next feature to tackle we formulated hypotheses we wish to test to to positively affect the overall performance of the game and target our winning aspiration for the company. This was achieved through vigorous discussions, research, collection and revision of data and performing a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess). We also required further research to make a decision so we performed a RICLE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Longevity, Effort) analysis. After consensus and buy in we then moved into the feature development process.

The feature development process is built up of 3 main phases:

1. Design Phase
2. Prototype Phase
3. Production Phase

Design Phase

The design and product leadership team should try to reference where possible and use research to help inform our decisions as much as possible. Search for features and games outside the problem space or casual market. Identify or highlight some key games or features that could be cobbled together or help us start with a framework. Gain an understanding of what’s performing and what’s not.

Then we create design goals, player goals and product outcomes. This should speak to elements such as:

• What hypotheses are we trying to test?
• What are some of the design challenges we want to solve or address?
• What behaviours and emotions do we want to elicit from our players?
• What are the KPIs this feature will be targeting?

These goals can be created in parallel to market research so it can best inform the direction and space we want to move in. Or we might want to iterate on these goals after further research to best inform how we move forward.

Finally, we will open up a design inbox with the team, review and then create a spec and do several rounds of feedback until we are happy to kill or move on.

Prototype Phase

Create and iterate on Prototype/MVP, Test goals, Art exploration, UX MockUps and Plat test cloud. This should repeat until we find something we are happy with or kill.

Production Phase

Sprint Planning, feature production, reviews, polish, feature lock, bug fixing and release. Once we release we should review the performance and assess if we need a V2 of the feature.

Feature Showcase

Season Pass

A Season Pass is a limited-time event that rewards players as they progress through completing levels for exclusive rewards, such as in-game currency, power-ups and more. The season pass encourages consistent engagement, providing both free and premium tiers to appeal to all player types, and enhance the overall player experience with a sense of progression and achievement.

This was the first feature we developed post-global launch, designed to boost engagement and monetization in line with similar features used by our competitors. I led the design, creating the complete design document and user flows, and collaborated with the team to integrate it into the game. We discovered that the feature primarily drove monetization when focusing on rewards tied to Match-3 items and in-game currency. While it achieved significant monetization uplift, we concluded that customization items would be needed to further enhance player retention.

Crusher Carnage

• Crusher carnage is a time-limited event where players must:
• Beat levels to earn Crane Claws.
• Use Crane Claws to uncover cars.
• Find all the cars and progress through scrapyards to win all the rewards.

I led the design for Crusher Carnage and collaborated with a multidisciplinary team to bring the feature to life. I conducted market research, developed player flows, and worked closely with artists and UX designers to address key challenges, such as displaying target cars and optimizing the entire player journey. The feature was successfully released and drove a 9% increase in ARPU.

Twin Turbo

• Twin Turbo is a permanent feature to boost monetisation 
• Win 10 levels to activate the Twin Turbo
• Doubles the effect of Turbos!
• The Twin Turbo will be active until you lose a level.

Twin Turbo was a feature aimed at boosting monetization throughout the entire M3 campaign. Due to shifting priorities, it moved in and out of the roadmap several times, changing hands among different designers. I initially created the design based on competitive analysis, and when the feature moved into development, a junior designer took the lead. I supported and guided design decisions during development, particularly with one of our main challenges: effectively representing player progression. Originally, we considered using a dial, but space constraints led us to use lights at the bottom to display multiple progression states. This required an abstract animation to indicate active and inactive states consistently. This also meant we could easily show the different states across the different screens in the game.

Gaskets Gridlock

• Gasket Gridlock is a mini-game whereby players must:
• Win M3 levels to gain energy
• Use energy to remove cars that are blocking the roads
• Progress through all the levels to win prizes!

Gasket’s Gridlock was designed as a mini-game within CVC to engage and monetize our regular players. I supported a junior designer who led this feature, providing feedback and guidance throughout development. Additionally, I contributed to the creation of content for the many levels within the mini-game

Drag Race

• Race with your own restored cars
• Beat levels to collect tokens and upgrade the cars performance
• Win races to earn amazing prizes
• Compete in multiple cups to earn even better prizes.

Drag Race was primarily developed in collaboration with Creative Mobile, a company with extensive experience in racing games, making them an ideal partner for bringing this feature to life. Our team handled the final stage of development, adding new features, balancing gameplay, and polishing the overall experience. I contributed by creating a design brief, refining the initial concept, and providing feedback throughout the process, especially during the final development phase to ensure quality and alignment with our vision.

The Business – Deep dive

Our mission is to add a compelling feature that fulfils the tycoon promise of Chrome Valley Customs and engage and monetise a broader audience of regular players.

We aim to do this by adding resource management and idle mechanics to a canvas that the player can build and customise over many years of play. The core experience should stand alone from the puzzle and decorate loop but also encourage regular engagement with match 3 to maintain our primary monetisation vector.

Feature Overview

The canvas map feature will provide the fantasy of building, running and upgrading a car business through the use of:

• A canvas map where players can build, upgrade and interact with buildings and car customers
• Manage resources from scrap, wheels, paint, engines and body parts, to fix, restore and build cars
• Earn cash and build a profit through fulfilling orders
• Expand, decorate and grow your car business

It will be a permanent feature accessed via a button on the garage home screen. The core loop of the feature will include:

• Salvage Scrap
• Produce Goods
• Fulfil Orders
• Collect Cash and Build 

The canvas feature will be fueled from playing match 3 levels for chests that players use to collect items to help with their production chains.

• Play Match 3 and gain chests
• Use goods to help with their production chains
• Earn Cash and XP from fulfilling orders

I was tasked with creating a business feature using the reference of Township. I had to create and design:

1. An entire car fantasy economy with hundreds of items, production chains and buildings.
2. A new innovative way to represent the car fantasy of buying and selling cars in the “Car Lot” and the collection of scrap in the scrapyard.
3. The FTUE, task system, train station, M3 chest system, shop, customer/reputation system, map layout and numerous small features required to integrate this meta feature with the core.

Above you can see the many items being grouped and designed for the economy and below the art for them all.

Furthermore, the entire economy had to be set up and maintained in Excel where we tracked everything and integrated it into Unity.

Ultimately we ended up killing this massive feature as it didn’t perform. The goal was to increase regular customers and we saw little impact. I think my biggest learnings were:

1. We qualified our decisions with a lot of research and questionnaires but in the end it wasn’t for everyone. I would be more cautious of survey results and small PTCs as they can give you false negatives.
2. We saw success in Township applying a causal game mode (M3) to a more hardcore genre resource management. Looking back now it makes sense that our player would find it hard moving to a more core feature. Even after they stated they wanted more tycoon, business simulation. We just didn’t make the right feature for our audience.
3. Taking on a big feature like this we need to be able to test earlier and gain validation on the feature with the real audience at scale.
4. I would get more people involved earlier to help with validating the direction. A few people weren’t 100% with the direction. I should of worked harder to fix those concerns before we released.