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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.
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Project Goal
To launch Mafia Wars worldwide.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Participated in internal company-wide playtests and sat in on external player testing, following up with recommendations.
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Created UI assets, components, and widgets in Unity.
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Made prefabs of my Illustrator designs into Unity for Developers to code.
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Designed icons for the UI.
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Iterated and evolved the UX/UI patterns and visual design.
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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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