Snipers vs Thieves: The Heist

Game Link

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.playstack.snipersvsthieves.heist 

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/snipers-vs-thieves/id1159723495  

Project Context

I was brought into the project early in my professional career to work alongside behemoth games publisher Playstack, delivering design work at regular milestones ahead of soft launch across global territories.

Detailed Contribution

Meta & retention systems design

• Live-ops design planning and implementation including bi-weekly objectives and XP rewards on rotation

• Divisions and level progression XP, reward milestones design and in-engine implementation 

Monetization Design

• Economy design planning and in-engine implementation across the entire game to ensure sinks & faucets felt fair and frequent for the end user. This included the cost of shop items, balancing of rare and time-limited live-ops weapons, gadgets and cosmetics, loot box rarity percentage balancing and their rewards alongside a time-limited, ad-incentivised loot box system rewarding ad-triggered loot rewards of different rarities from tokens earned from playing and winning

• Season pass progression, rewards and pricing strategies for two paid-for (premium and premier+) tiers

Core Gameplay Features & Balancing

• Full loadout and equipment menu UX redesign including top menu presentation, equip logic with multiple equip slots for the same item type and isolated design for weapons and gadgets of multiple rarities, upgrade levels, stats, and costs

• Friends & invite system including handling accepting/declining requests, sending requests, pending requests, removing friends, temporary recently met contacts, chat functionality, online/offline friend display and presentation of party members in lobby 

• Performance medals (otherwise known as badges or trophies) across bronze, silver and gold tiers that reflect sequential (e.g 'kill 5 opponents without dying') or one-off activities ('Finish as the match MVP') for post-match rewards

• Design of an emoji system comprised of a bottom-anchored button for minimal intrusion and 4 emoji slots synchronised from the respective module from the loadout menu, alongside the visual presentation of confetti and a suitably-sized emoji appearing to the side of the user for taunting or reaction purposes. 

• Weapons and gadget balancing across a variety of classes and weapon types including bespoke values for three post-FTUE, first matches against AI opponents of gradually harder difficulties. This included bespoke health values, weapon and gadget damage and cool-down values for AI opponents

FTUE & Onboarding Design

• Text writing, scenario outline, enemy and player placements, enemy difficulty, weapon damage, staggered onboarding content and reward unlocks and various other detailed design plans for a 20-minute onboarding and FTUE

Project Outcomes

With the aid of the Head of Production and an experienced dev team, all content was approved by the publisher and rolled out into production builds throughout multiple soft launch phases.

The project was then handed back to the publisher as our contract had expired.

Metrics

Whilst detailed metrics and analytics sat mostly publisher-side, it was made clear that onboarding drop-off killed D1 retention. From the data available to us, PlaytestCloud results evidenced this with absolute certainty. FTUE completion time totalled over 10 minutes, and combined with 3 mandatory (albeit truncated) matches, this led to high FTUE churn. 

Lessons Learned Going Forward

Through collaborative effort between our publisher and us, a more experienced Theo would have used market data for existing titles to support the argument that a streamlined, quicker, and less modular handheld FTUE may have improved D1 retention by reducing churn. A seamless FTUE level that recreates a real-world match with bots, as we see in other modern-day shooters, as opposed to jarring drop-in, drop-out set piece scenarios, would have likely been the optimal solution. Frontloading both Sniper and Thief mechanics and gameplay nuances in one big level was overwhelming and boring.