-
- At Zynga, I was given the challenge of bringing the excellent Facebook game Scramble to the iPhone and iPod touch. The final product — rapidly developed with a phenomenal team — exceeded internal expectations, and remains one of the top word games on the platform. Word Scramble features a super-competitive live mode, as well as asynchronous challenges against friends, solo play, and the surprisingly fun single-device “Play & Pass” mode. Game data is shared with Facebook, and a friend ladder displays your friends’ top scores.
-
- During my time at area/code, I also worked on a title for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, writing the majority of the creative copy, as well as contributing to iterative design. Sharkrunners used real-world telemetry data as the basis for its real-time oceanic exploration. Cell phone alerts inform players when their virtual ships are close to real sharks, prompting them to log online and engage in increasingly dangerous observation missions.
-
- My first title as Design Lead at Playdom is City of Wonder, a city-building social game that takes the winning formula from Social City and adds an ever-expanding adventure through the ages of time, starting in the stone age and expanding through modern times and beyond. Just two months after launch, City of Wonder has broken records at Playdom, having already reached 1 million daily active users and over 10 million users a month, What’s more, CoW is even a critical success, receiving glowing reviews from numerous outlets.
-
- Caption My final project at Zynga was the cooking/restaurant simulation Café World, now the fastest growing game in Facebook’s history with five million daily active users within one week of launching. I worked in collaboration with a dedicated group of designers, engineers, artists and producers, without whom this project wouldn’t have been possible.
-
- While working with area/code in New York City, I contributed to the design of the ARG Primacy (built for the CBS show NUMB3RS), and its casual game offshoot, Chain Factor. The simple flash game was intended to combine the simple arithmetic joys of Sudoku with casual blockbusters like Bejeweled. area/code later took this same design to the iPhone with Drop7, which has been critically acclaimed as one of the best titles available for the platform.
-
- Following City of Wonder, my studio at Playdom was challenged with bringing the popular “Hidden Objects” genre of casual games to Facebook. We exceed all expectations with Gardens of Time, a massive critical and commercial success for Playdom that proved the validity of the genre on social networks. Gardens of Time peaked at just over 4 million daily active users (then a new record for Playdom), and an astonishing 17M monthly actives. Most recently, Gardens of Time was honored by receiving the “Best Social Network Game” award at the 2011 GDC Online Choice Awards. I’m incredibly proud of this game, and all of Studio 24 for making it as incredible as it is.
