CASTLEVILLE
Associate Game Designer | Zynga, 2011 - 2012
BUILDING DESIGN
With all games in the 'Ville franchise CasteVille was a city-building game with a focus on social interaction and working together. In order to keep content fresh and engaging my team focused on a constant cadence of new buildings, crops, monsters, and decoration objects available to the user every week. Some buildings were simple visual updates while others had entirely new functions associated with them.
CHARACTER DIALOG
CastleVille is home to a colorful cast of characters, each with their own personality and likes / dislikes. As part of implementing new features we always made sure that the characters involved felt alive and responsive to the player's actions. This meant that all the dialog that we had to write was carefully peer-reviewed to insure it really felt genuine to the world of CastleVille.
QUEST DESIGN
Most of the actions the player takes in CastleVille are in the service of trying to complete a quest. Each quest usually required two or three tasks to be completed. It was my responsibility to define what those tasks were and how much of a reward to give. Additionally I had to provide reports to management detailing how much time / money the player would need in order to complete the quest so that they could factor that into future items on the roadmap.