Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes
A mobile RPG with strategic turn-based combat featuring character collection from every era of Star Wars, including legends. Includes multiple game modes including large-scale Guild Raid and Territory modes.
Promotional video for Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes
#1 Star Wars Mobile Game to Date
I have been a huge fan of Star Wars since my dad first introduced me to the original trilogy as a kid. During the interview process and after I started work, the passion and enthusiasm of the team for all things Star Wars and not only the game’s community, but the entire global community of fans could not be missed. But there were some oddities too - I joined EA’s Capital Games studio following an exodus of its design leadership. There were incredibly talented and hard-working associate game designers and game designer 1s on the team who all reported to a single overworked producer with no game design experience. They had no one to advocate for the design discipline, their work circumstances, or to mentor them.
I was fortunate to have enough experience to come in and start the process of being their advocate as I learned about the inner workings of the game, their challenges, and their goals. After a few more months, we finally got an incredible game design director in Doug Woolsey, and eventually another senior game designer, Matt Miller. At that point, the junior designers were split between Matt and I while the most-senior among us reported to Doug. This was a really fulfilling time for me as I got to invest my energy really efficiently by providing growth opportunities for so many designers, it proved to be a force multiplier on the team’s output while they all leveled up their careers.
Game Content
For my individual contributions, I started as the lead on the “live” side, which handled character releases, event cycles, game balance, and store content. When I joined, the meta was very stale around the Sith Triumvirate and the studio set the goal of progressively chipping away at that dominance without undermining player investment in such a hard-to-earn squad too sharply. I guided the balance strategy, reworks, and release cadence that delivered on ever-shifting goals around this change while also hitting revenue targets for the new releases.
I also designed the kit for and implemented the character Bastila Shan (Fallen), who was meant to have good supporting synergy with any Sith squads, but to have very tight and powerful synergy with the unreleased character, Darth Revan without revealing anything about his kit or going beyond teasing the character.
I designed & implemented the Legendary Event to unlock Grand Master Yoda.
I approached my first event for Galaxy of Heroes by trying to follow what was working for the event format and staying true to who Grand Master Yoda was at the height of the Galactic Republic.
Train against the best to unlock the best!
Giving players a clear path towards the most iconic ships and characters was a huge quality of life improvement.
Working closely with Product Management, Artists, and Engineers to make a visually stunning and easy-to-use feature was deeply satisfying.
Bringing a KOTOR character back to life was a high-pressure thrill.
Bastila had to serve as a Sith squad catalyst and key party member for Darth Revan. She had to do a lot, but I didn’t want to make her kit too complex.
I leaned into a few powerful conditional effects and introduced a new debuff: Fear.
Features
After around 9 months on the live side of the game, the game design director asked me if I would be willing to move over to the beleagured Features team where I would be much more isolated from the other designers and be tasked with designing under direct scrutiny from an exacting executive producer and a GM under a lot of pressure to grow a several year old game to offset underperforming games in EA’s portfolio. He believed I was up to it even though it was a politically-charged environment on a team with little momentum. I accepted.
I tackled a number of smaller iterative projects, but there were 3 large projects I’m especially proud of. The first two, the Journey Guide and the Hypderdrive Bundle were shipped as a pair to try to address a business problem from two different directions: As it aged, SWGOH would see large surges of new players anytime something significant happened with Star Wars media. But those players were years behind the “golden cohort” that, despite having great retention, was slowly shrinking. Our most dedicated players were having a hard time replenishing the ranks of their Guilds. To make matters worse, those years of gameplay were packed with more and more characters - many with nesting doll unlock patterns gated by events that might only run twice a year. You could be the world’s biggest C-3PO or Rey fan, but if you installed the game at the wrong time, you didn’t have a great path to unlock them.
The Journey guide converted timed events into permanently available challenges that guided players to the activities they needed to play with permanently available challenges. They also offered bespoke store offers to help players advance more quickly. The Hyperdrive bundle tackled the most time-consuming and tedious parts of gameplay to launch new players into the end-game where our newest and best experiences were. The combination was phenemenal - we struck a balance between increasing revenue, increasing retention, and increasing engagement all with positive player sentiment.
Making people comfortable with “giving away a lot” was a challenge.
But working closely with the incredible analytics team to show how much we would improve our conversion rate and average revenue per paying player sealed the deal. Selling it to players and making the technical upgrades and unlock skips work correctly was a triumph by our engineering and QA teams.
I created and pitched the original designs for Conquest to create evergreen gameplay.
At its core, SWGOH is a collection game, but players only use a small set of their heroes at any given time and eventually, they achieve mastery over all the content.
I designed Conquest to reward investment in a wide range of units through rotating themed modifiers which could provide a localized meta independent of the PVP GVG and GVE constraints. Creating branching paths further added to the variety for players from run to run and creating consumables that were only usable in the Conquest game mode - Data Disks which further customized your gameplay created fun game-bending rogue-lite mechanics.
To give a sense of scope for Conquest: the team shipped it almost a year after I left Capital Games.
At one point, Product Management determined that a critical number of players had completed too much of their characters’ progressions. I was tasked with developing a new system that could also serve as a sink for excess materials and Credits. I worked with our partners at Lucas Film to gather an exhaustive list of in-universe items that we could associate with characters. I worked closely with our UI/UX designers and artists to develop a compelling visual treatment for what could otherwise be considered boring items in the face of an already crowded menu. I designed the conversion economy for components to allow long-time players to immediately surge into the system with banked resources, but to still be deep and sustainable without being daunting for new players.