DISNEY MAGIC KINGDOMS

Platforms:
iOS,
Android,
Windows

Engine:
PME (Proprietary)

Team Size:
150+

Role:
Game Designer,
Principal Content Designer

Overview:

Disney Magic Kingdoms is a live service tycoon game with over 115 million downloads. My current duties include both content design and feature design.

For content work, I fulfill the role of Principal Content Designer, where I oversee many aspects of content design production, including:

  • Designing every new quest in the game; having developed a deep familiarity with the game’s difficulty modifiers has allowed me to design quest flows following a structured method that rationally increase in difficulty and complexity as players progress.

  • Conceptualizing the game’s most prominent content pieces, proactively identifying potential red flags to ensure alignment with external licensors’ guidelines and values, and creating briefs to be followed by our internal art teams.

  • Providing design direction to writers, and submitting narrative pitches and scripts.

  • Developing documentation used across departments project-wide, integrated with 'smart' functionality using formulas and VBA, such as error catchers, data generators, deadline trackers, and more.

  • Onboarding and mentoring new designers, and creating tools to improve productivity and track deadlines, supporting an increase in collectable content released per year by 30%, while also supporting an increase in our update release cadence from every 6 weeks to every 4 weeks.

Pinocchio Event flow: Achieved a smooth difficulty curve via quest length & density, and character involvement & level ups. There are few other tricks in there too!

For feature work, I’ve owned numerous initiatives from inception to release, including:

  • Gameplay features: e.g., “Thrill Levels for Other Zones,” expanding on our Thrills mechanic which introduced deeper tycoon elements to our basic park-building gameplay by challenging players to meet additional park requirements.

  • Monetization methods: e.g., “Promo Characters,” dynamically changing NPCs who wander the park and can be purchased for cash or gems (essentially walking, talking billboards!), which increased the conversion rate for some purchasable bundles by as much as 150%.

  • Quality-of-life improvements: e.g., “Group Activity Clarity for Busy Characters,” tracking when characters are busy and displaying new iconography for this across different parts of the game, resolving a long-standing pain point with players.

The main interface for the Thrills feature, each zone having a distinct set of objectives. Pictured above is the one for the Space Mountain zone.