Game Portfolio -- Animal Cove

Animal Cove

• Release Date: October 2017
• Current Availability: Removed from App store February 2021
• Release Credit Category: Marketing Credit, Writing, and Design Credit
• Company: KingsIsle
• Business Model: Free-to-Play
• Category: Mobile Game
• Genre: Match 3, Puzzle, Simulation

Personal Development Notes

• Fun Fact: When the game launched it made the featured list on the app store and was KingsIsle's first mobile game to ever be featured.  We celebrated in the office!  
  
  
• Job Highlights: This is the first game I worked on as a Game Designer. This is the first game I worked on as a Writer. This is the last game I worked on with a Marketing credit. It was in fact, Animal Cove that allowed me to transition from Marketing to Design. It's a tale in three parts.
  
  Part 1: When Animal Cove was still very early in development, corporate wasn't happy about the way the story was headed, so they initially turned to me to help spice up the dialog. I went a little crazy with it at first and was re-writing Harper as a goofy sergeant. Obviously, some of my ideas were a little too out there, and I ended up toning it down. A lot of the early jokes in the game were from me.
  
  I also penned several random dialog lines that would pop up when the animals would walk around and think to themselves. I also helped script the initial cut-scene that was eventually removed from the beginning of the game. Eventually the creative team had more bandwidth when a new writer was hired, and I was freed up.
  
  Part 2:  I was really busy. I mean it. I was too busy. This was mostly my doing, but as good of a face I put on in public, I was bordering on a nervous breakdown. I was playing the part of Community Manager for two MMOs, all Public Relations, and all Social Media for all of KingsIsle's games.  It was too much for one person, but I somehow found a way to make it work. For Marketing, I put in all the initial groundwork for hyping Animal Cove, prepping social sites, and writing and reviewing press releases.
  
  Part 3: I needed a change at KingsIsle, or I was going to break. As it turns out, Animal Cove was in dire need of someone to keep building match 3 levels, and I convinced my various bosses to let me try my hand at it. IT installed Unity on my laptop that I carried back and forth to work, and I took a quick crash course in Unity. I'd then go home after work and on my own time, sit down at the kitchen table after dinner with the family, and work again late into the night crafting my first match 3 levels. They liked what I was putting out, and I managed to convince them (and they were gracious enough) to let me shift over to Design. They hired two people and outsourced a PR team to replace me.  
  
  
• Best Memory: Honestly, my best memories were when I switched roles and joined the Animal Cove Design Team in the office work area, working side-by-side with Andrew Riehm and eventually Justin Hodges as we made match 3 level after match 3 level.
  
  
• Other Comments: Had Animal Cove remained profitable, I would have gladly continued designing match 3 levels for it into the thousands of levels! Definitely check out this dev diary where Scott and I talk about the game, and I talk about how I used give all of my levels goofy names.
  
  For more on Animal Cove level design, see here: level design

Sample Gameplay:

Did you know that there are entire YouTube channels dedicated to Match 3 level playthroughs?  Dmitriy Nikitin was an absolute hero and captured pretty much all of our levels in Animal Cove, so I still have these to look back on and watch.  Here's level 599 that I talked about in the Dev Diary.