Game Portfolio -- EverClicker

 EverClicker

• Release Date: August 2016
• Current Availability: Sunset from app stores in 2021
• Release Credit Category: Marketing Credit
• Company: KingsIsle
• Business Model: Free-to-Play
• Category: Mobile Game
• Genre: Clicker, RPG

Personal Development Notes

• Fun Fact: On the EverClicker Forums, my username was Moss Beard, named after my favorite character in the game!
  
  
• Job Highlights: Similar to other mobile game titles from KingsIsle, my main job duties included setting up and running social media for the games, responding to reviews from players on the app store, talking with players on the Touch Arcade site, writing and publishing press releases, assisting with the trailer for the game, and general game promotion.
  
  For Everclicker I helped coordinate a really popular cross-promotion where if you earned 4 stars in the game, you would get a couple Crowns codes for use in Wizard101/Pirate101. Our old Data Analyst, Andrew Strite, was the mastermind behind that particular promotion. He went on to work over at Bethesda -- they're lucky to have him!
  
  
• Best Memory: A lot of super fans of KingsIsle's games made a guild in Everclicker called the "Spiral Guild." Chatting on Twitter and in our guild chat within Everclicker was the best. I'm still amazed at how far Oz made it in the game . . . star 2424!
  
  
• Other Comments:  In my mind, Everclicker felt like the evolution of a standard mobile clicker game (for example, what other clicker game had a guild boss in it at the time?). It had really good game play and provided me with hours of fun! 

Sample Gameplay:

I'm glad I twitch streamed some of the gameplay so I could have it to look back on. It was fun to watch this again.

Game Portfolio -- War Goonz

War Goonz

• Release Date: November 2017
• Current Availability: Cancelled during soft launch March 2019
• Release Credit Category: Marketing Credit
• Company: KingsIsle
• Business Model: Free-to-Play
• Category: Mobile Game
  
• Genre: Strategy, PvP

Personal Development Notes

• Fun Fact: Just like with Get Jiggy, the current Marketing Manager for KingsIsle, one Kayly Ginsberg, also used to write quite a bit about the War Goonz Beta on her blog The Untold Spiral. (I think it was me that actually pulled her into the Beta. Community Managers have pull like that.)
  
  
• Job Highlights: Besides getting super fans like Kayly into the Beta, I also did some work on the War Goonz social media sites and assisted with the creation of a trailer video. 
  
  
• Best Memory: I playtested the heck out of this game! One of the best compliments I received was when Chad Brown, aka Red Five of now DCUO fame, played through the town I had designed and commented on how well put together it was. I'll never forget that! 
  
  
• Other Comments: War Goonz was another game where, unfortunately, the metrics didn't warrant a full release. The art assets for this game have been kicking around for a while, and they're so good that they continue to be reused in other prototypes. They're begging to find a home!

Sample Gameplay:

Game Portfolio -- Get Jiggy

Get Jiggy

• Release Date: July 2016
• Current Availability: Canceled during Canadian Soft Launch in 2017
• Release Credit Category: Marketing Credit
• Company: KingsIsle
• Business Model: Free-to-Play
• Category: Mobile Game
• Genre: Puzzle

Personal Development Notes

• Fun Fact: The current Marketing Manager for KingsIsle, one Kayly Ginsberg aka Vanessa Mythdust, was originally a super fan of KingsIsle's games until she made the jump to paid employee. Back in the day she penned a magnificent blog post about it from the outside looking in. Honestly, it's a really a great breakdown about what the game was all about. 
  
  
• Job Highlights: My contributions to Game Development came from setting up the social sites, playtesting the game, helping review the images in the puzzle picture packs, and working with our videographer Damon to create the game's trailer.
  
  Speaking of the trailer, TJ O'Leary and I still laugh about the line, "If you like puzzles. prizes. and fast-paced, live, multiplayer battles . . . then it's time to Get Jiggy!" On first read through, our voice actress made the delivery of "Get Jiggy" very Jessica Rabbit-esque. We had her re-record the line because, as the joke goes, we were looking for 30% sass instead of 80% sass.
  
  
• Best Memory: My best memories of this game come from when we'd play PvP matches with other people in the office.  Look, we used to get pretty competitive about these puzzle battles in KingsIsle's old Domain building! 
  
  
• Other Comments: It was a very unique game idea that never took off, and the game's metrics were such that it couldn't make it out of soft launch. Perhaps the hyper-casual puzzle category of the app store wasn't quite ready to add some PvP to their jigsaw puzzles?
  
  BTW, the soundtrack for the game was crafted by Bobby Moen, and it is some absolutely fantastic, lounge jazzy goodness. The music is what I miss the most! Thankfully most of it is still on the web on Bobby's Soundcloud page.

Sample Gameplay:

This footage comes from the aforementioned blog post of Kayly Ginsberg! Enjoy!

Game Portfolio -- AlphaCat

AlphaCat

• Release Date: June 2015
• Current Availability: Game removed from stores in 2018
• Release Credit Category: Marketing Credit
• Company: KingsIsle
• Business Model: Free-to-Play
• Category: Mobile Game
• Genre: Puzzle, RPG

Personal Development Notes

• Fun Fact:  Typically there is a cap to the number of ads you can watch in a day in exchange for energy in a game, but when we launched AlphaCat you could watch ads infinitely for some reason. Because of this, I played all day and all night to beat the game in a weekend. After that it was simply logging on to attempt to get an epic character and playing through the Invasions feature.
  
  
• Job Highlights: One of my favorite social media campaigns was the use of the hashtag #KnowYourCrewMembers on Twitter. It was a chance to show off some of the fun characters in the game.
  
  As it turns out, it can be very difficult to get reporters to write about your latest and greatest mobile game, so many times I'd have to reach out to the roads less traveled, for instance, helping craft a top ten tips article for Heavy.com, reaching out to mobile gamers on the Touch Arcade forums, doing interviews with Scifi sites, and rubbing elbows with good ol' bloggers. 
  
  
• Best Memory: I loved watching people play AlphaCat in person at the SXSW Gaming Convention! The game at the time was in its beta phase, and there was one particular girl who would not stop playing it at our booth. She had found "her game," which made me very happy. Sometimes in Marketing you'll pay to have customer profile sheets made up for your target audience -- This girl would have been a perfect profile for Alphacat.
  
  
• Other Comments: This will forever be the game that I "gave an arm and a leg" to promote thanks to a viral video gone bad where I dressed up in an AlphaCat costume and accidentally fell out of a tree during filming, fracturing an arm and a leg in the process. Yup. That's a true story. It was great going to the SXSW Gaming Convention, but being there on crutches in a huge convention hall with no handicap parking nearby . . . not so much. 
   

Sample Gameplay:

Game Portfolio -- Rise and Destroy

Rise and Destroy

• Release Date: June 2015
• Current Availability: Game fully removed from app stores on February 17, 2021
• Release Credit Category: Marketing Credit
• Company: KingsIsle
• Business Model: Free-to-Play
• Category: Mobile Game
• Genre: Action Strategy

Personal Development Notes

• Fun Fact: Frankie Forearms can still be found in Wizard101 as a wandering animal in the Arcanum and as a pet. As a pet, it is now an extremely rare find since it was unable to be hatched with other pets. It's been argued that it was a bad decision, but it did create a rare pet that drives collectors crazy! (Maybe KingsIsle will retroactively change that now that the game has gone bye bye?) To get the pet originally, you had to complete the first three levels of Rise and Destroy as a part of a limited-time cross-promotion with Wizard101.
  
  
• Job Highlights: The Community Team at this time went through a lot of work trying to develop fun things we could do to help promote the game. I loved how passionate our social media manager was about the game even though she didn't fit the typical gamer personality you'd find working in the game industry. We hosted a special Launch Party KI Live around Rise and Destroy and Julia destroyed us all in a simultaneous game as we played through level 4 of the game.
  
  Responding to players who left app store reviews, researching where our game was being talked about online, and coming up with creative marketing were all job highlights for me.
  
  After Rise and Destroy launched, KingsIsle also held an internal game jam for its developers. The Community Management team put together a web-based achievement hunting game idea surrounding Rise and Destroy that could have been an amazing promotion for the game, but unfortunately we lacked an available web developer to help us make our dream promotion for this game a reality. I remember Josef Hall coming up to the community team after game jam and congratulating us on using game jam to creatively do our jobs of coming up with ways to promote the game. That felt pretty great!
  
  As a part of that game jam pitch, I also created a really basic dance game in Construct 2 that featured Frankie Forearms rocking it out! It was your basic up, down, left, right dance game with a space bar move to enter "disco mode." Good times! 
  
  
• Best Memory: I had a blast dressing up as a T-rex to make our "What a T-rex can't do / can do" social buzz videos. Actually convincing KI to drop money on a T-rex costume has got to be another job highlight.
  
  
• Other Comments:  Rise and Destroy was KingsIsle's first mobile game that wasn't an IP related to Wizard101. Marketing went through a lot of work and research understanding the Mobile Game Market and translating the game into several languages -- way more languages than was really necessary. 

Sample Gameplay:

This is a walk through video I made of a particularly difficult level to help one of the fans who was struggling to beat it.

Game Portfolio -- Grub Guardian

Grub Guardian

• Release Date: January 2012
• Current Availability: Limited availability on iOS
• Release Credit Category: Marketing Credit
• Company: KingsIsle
• Business Model: Free-to-Play
• Category: Web-based and Mobile
• Genre: Tower Defense

Personal Development notes

• Fun Fact: Originally Grub Guardian appeared in its beta phase on the now defunct freekigames.com website. Apparently you can currently still play this game if you have an old enough iOS device (try an iPhone 4 or 5). 
  
  
• Job Highlights: At some point in 2012-2013, I was given the job of handling social media responsibilities for Grub Guardian and also managing the prize distribution. Updating the master list for prizes was an enormous undertaking as each puzzle had a tier list associated with it, and the prizes were different for each tier. To update the prizes, we used a Web-based content management system. Eventually the knowledge I learned from working with Grub Guardian allowed me to pivot the Dueling Diego minigame on the FreeKIGames website to instead distribute Pirate101 items in place of Wizard101 prizes.
  
  
• Best Memory: For some reason I have a very distinct memory of talking for a long time about the tiers of Grub Guardian with Sean McIntosh, KingsIsle's (and now WIMO's) Director of Art. I believe this was the first time I ever worked with Sean. We work much more closely now that I've pivoted to Design, so it's fun to look back at these times for me.
  
  
• Other Comments:  Ultimately, I'm really happy players of Wizard101 had a fun game on Mobile that could also earn them rewards in their favorite MMO and also be an alternate method for leveling their pets.
  
  

Sample Gameplay:

Back when Grub Guardian launched on FreeKIGames, I made this video showing one of the early levels of Grub Guardian.

Game Portfolio -- RPG Dice, Heroes of Whitestone

RPG Dice Heroes of Whitestone

• Release Date: January 18, 2022
• Current Availability: Available for download on iOS or Android
• Release Credit Category: Design / Writing Credit
• Company: WIMO Games
• Business Model: Free-to-Play
• Category: Mobile
• Genre: RPG Board Game

Personal Development notes

• Fun Fact: After Dice was launched into the app stores and ended up doing really well, WIMO responded with some fun swag for the employees. The coolest swag was a big set of lawn dice where the number one was replaced with the RPG DICE logo.
   



• Job Highlights: I was originally brought on to the Dice Team to help with the tutorial and other tasks until I was assigned to work on another game. Some of the enemy team compositions in Chapters 3 and 4 of the Campaign were originally pieced together by me, and I had a hand in crafting a couple of the tutorial sequences for the game. I also assigned the tiles to one of the Relic Adventure boards, but I honestly can't remember which one it was.
  
  Later, when Dice was transferred to WIMO upon the sale of KingsIsle and without a full-time creative writer on staff, WIMO turned to me to help them with writing in addition to my other duties as the Senior Designer for Outsourcing. The Main Campaign Story for Chapter 7 was written by me as well as the Relic Adventure stories for Chapters 3 through 6. The Goblin Tile text and several Skill Check Tile texts were written by me as well.
  
  
• Best Memory: I was invited to participate in the first internal playtest of the game, and you could just tell there was something different about this game that made it special. Everyone was excited about it. I remember being in a meeting about the playtest results, and my only comment was something to the effect of  . . . Congratulations, this game is really good! 
  
  
• Other Comments: There's a great team at WIMO behind this game, and they continue to work hard by bringing new, and regular updates to players! I can't wait to see where this game is in a year from now! It just keeps getting better.

Sample Gameplay:

I sat down the other day and recorded video of the first half of the Chapter 5 Relic Adventure. At the end of the video there's some summoning, hero leveling, and a fight with the Guild Boss, which should give you a good idea of what you'll find if you play RPG Dice, Heroes of Whitestone.