POLITICIDE
Lead Designer / Systems Designer
Responsibilities: Completely redesign broken game economy and balance win-lose conditions
Politicide is a political themed strategy simulation where you play as the leader of a political movement. The goal is to gain followers and brainwash the world through strategies such as staging terrorist attacks and controlling the media.
Contributions
Redesigned previously broken mechanics including a world map, story events, brainwashing, and the skill tree resulting in the average playtime increasing by 500% (average of 2 minutes to roughly 15 minutes) per play session.
Created in depth documentation of all mechanics that were reconstructed or edited.
Conducted extensive in person play testing at events like PAX East and BostonFig.
All design choices were supported by data collected from play testing and player retention data on DevToDev.
Being on the Politicide team was a challenge because it was my first shipped title for MassDiGI before I was even accepted as an Intern by the company. My role in this project was to simply “fix the game” which was a huge undertaking considering the original creator left the company years ago and was working out in California. He was the only person on the team who had an idea of what the vision for the game was going to be and how the game was supposed to work. I got in contact with him and spent multiple long nights on calls with him trying to figure out the vision for this game and how to work everything. He himself said that this game was not supposed to make it this deep into development which meant it was up to me to design for longevity. This game was important to MassDiGI because it had the longest play sessions averaging about 15 minutes when working properly. Despite all the frustrations and set backs it was definitely worth the effort. Not only was I able to set a framework for a successful game but I also got to learn about monetization and balancing game economies and mechanics which I ended up doing for multiple projects after.
