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Let's Push the Envelope.
Summary
Zynga put together a new product development division to create a mobile massively multiplayer online game based on their defunct Mafia Wars IP.
Project Goal
To launch Mafia Wars worldwide.
The Game
Mafia Wars lets players fight for control over real-world, contemporary cities, by joining a global network of criminals and using high stakes combat and conspiracy to gain power over millions of players. This narrative comes to life, embedding the player through a series of highly visual interactive features.
Tactic
The team was made of cross-functional pods. Each handling building different features, then merging that work into a hi-def build. The pods worked in a 2-week Sprint/Agile environment allowing for rapid deployment and testing, resulting in real player feedback and insights making space to adjust the gameplay and design accordingly.
Result
Mafia Wars soft-launched for several months of Live Development in Canada and Indonesia on Android and iOS. It had mixed reviews, and retention was poor. Zynga, as a company, was also pivoting its game development strategy, resulting in a cancelation of the game.
My Contributions
Designed 17 features, translating MVP key actions into fun, highly visual, and clear user interfaces.
Participated in internal company-wide playtests and sat in on external player testing, following up with recommendations.
Created UI assets, components, and widgets in Unity.
Made prefabs of my Illustrator designs into Unity for Developers to code.
Designed icons for the UI.
Iterated and evolved the UX/UI patterns and visual design.
Created lo-fi prototypes in Flinto to showcase user flow during feature check-ins.
Teams
Collaborated cross-functionally with core teams on every game feature. Then would engage the Experience Design team for design review before going into feature production.
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