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 worked on Seafight's live content: redesigning the Atlantis expansion, reworking select recurring events, shipping the Event Completion feature, introducing secret quests, and giving NPCs more creative designs.

The Atlantis redesign was the biggest single project. Atlantis was supposed to be a flagship expansion but the data showed most players were not engaging with it at all. That was the clearest opportunity to work on, and fixing it produced the largest measurable result.

Working in a live product with years of accumulated player progress meant every change had to be additive. Any rebalance that devalued what players already owned would generate backlash. The economy modelling was not about optimising for ideal conditions. It was about finding adjustments that worked without making existing players feel cheated.

Cross-functional work had a specific failure mode here. Vague design documentation gets interpreted differently by different teams, and the feature that ships ends up different from what was designed. I became precise about specifications because I had seen what happened when I was not. The format I developed for feature specs became the team standard.

The Atlantis redesign started with the data. The expansion had low completion rates but the problem was not difficulty. The median player was not even starting it because the time-to-reward curve was tuned for the hardcore segment. Fixing it meant rebalancing the entry experience for the majority, not the top end. This was part of a redesign that delivered a 50% DAU uplift.

Event Completion came from a different observation. Players would join a live event, participate partially, and leave without finishing. The content was there, but nothing pushed them toward completing it. The feature I designed added clear progress tracking and rewards tied to full completion, making it visible when players were close to finishing and worthwhile to follow through. The goal was straightforward: fewer players leaving events with content left on the table.

Secret quests were designed as a discovery layer for the most engaged players. Hidden objectives tied to specific NPC interactions or world locations gave that segment something to find and talk about. They did not change the experience for casual players but added real depth for people who wanted it.

The NPC redesigns were more creative work. A lot of the existing characters were functionally identical placeholders. I gave them distinct visual identities, named personalities, and dialogue that made interactions feel intentional rather than generic. Small changes, but they made the world feel like someone had thought about it.

The Atlantis result was the headline, but the pattern that runs through all of it is the same: understand why players are not doing the thing, then remove the specific barrier. For Atlantis it was the entry curve. For events it was the lack of a completion incentive. For NPCs it was that nobody had given them character worth engaging with.

This way of thinking transfers directly to product work. NavEire and Tapglyph are built around the same question in different contexts: what is stopping the user from getting value, and what is the smallest change that removes that barrier?