Seafight

I joined Bigpoint as an Associate QA Analyst and was promoted to Game Designer after showing design instincts through my testing and feedback work. As Game Designer, I owned the engagement systems for Seafight. That meant designing live PvE and PvP content, balancing the in-game economy, and shipping features to a global player base.

The most impactful work was structural: rather than creating more content for existing systems, I redesigned the systems themselves. The Event Completion feature transformed isolated events into a connected chain where rewards from one event fed into the next, giving players a persistent reason to return between content drops.

The main challenge was working within a mature live product. Players had years of accumulated progress, items, and expectations. Any economy change that devalued their investment would cause backlash. I used analytics dashboards to model the impact of balance changes before they shipped, testing progression curves against historical player data.

Cross-functional collaboration was equally important. Game design documentation had to be precise enough for engineers to implement without ambiguity, clear enough for the art team to understand visual requirements, and strategic enough for production to prioritize correctly. I developed a documentation approach that the team adopted for all subsequent features.

My process started with data. I identified underperforming systems by looking at engagement metrics like session frequency, event participation rates, and progression milestones where drop-off spiked. The Atlantis expansion, for example, had low completion rates not because it was too hard, but because the reward structure did not justify the time investment for most player segments.

For each redesign, I mapped the existing loop, identified where the feedback or reward was weak, and designed a revised structure that kept the core experience while strengthening the reason to continue. Prototyping was done through detailed design documents and spreadsheet models of economy impact before any engineering work began.

The engagement uplift was the headline result, but the deeper lesson was about the difference between content and systems. Adding more content to a broken loop produces diminishing returns. Fixing the loop itself produces compounding returns because every future content drop benefits from the improved foundation.

This lesson has directly shaped how I think about building products outside games. Both Tapglyph and NavEire are built around the same question: what brings the user back? The context is different, but the principle is the same.