Dan Pearce Senior Games Designer

Case Study

Avakin Life

Long-running social mobile MMO.

Role
Senior Live Ops Designer
Dates
2019 to 2022
Platforms
iOS · Android

Context

Avakin Life is a free-to-play social game with MMO mechanics and multiverse concepts, played mainly on Android and iOS. Player base over 1 million.

What I owned

Senior Live Ops Designer at Lockwood. Owned the daily, weekly, and monthly event calendar. Each event had to do three things: keep DAU engaged, hit monetisation targets, and create reasons for players to play together.

Avakin Life avatar interaction

Day-to-day

  • Assessing performance of previous events and experiments.
  • Designing upcoming event themes and activities.
  • Working with developers on tools that improved live-ops pipelines.
  • Managing other Live Ops staff.
  • Making decisions on future Live Ops strategies.
Avakin Life event scene

Event example: The Forgotten Meadow

Design lead. Brief: a fun, engaging mini-game for a Cottage-core monthly theme.

Cottagecore theme reference

Four things it had to land:

  • A cosy aesthetic. Relaxed but engaging.
  • A multi-day return loop. Reasons to come back across the event window.
  • Monetisation levers. Event-currency boosters (double currency at a premium) and IAP offers giving players a distinctive farming look.
  • Social mechanics. Avakin Life is a social game, so the design had to support trading and collaboration.

References: Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, Farmville. The loop: buy tools with soft currency, use them to loot areas of the Meadow, sell the loot to a trader for exclusive cottage-core clothing, accessories, and furniture.

Cottagecore world reference

Players self-organised as traders within the scene with very little prompting, swapping rare loot and building friendships in the process. Strongest emergent behaviour from the event.

Data analysis & KPIs

Tracked event performance and overall game health daily through custom metrics built on Amazon Quicksight. Core KPIs:

  • DAU engagement with Event and Live Ops content.
  • Session length.
  • Revenue from Live Ops levers (premium currencies, unique IAP offers).

Tools & pipelines

A senior live-ops priority: ship as much content as possible without engineering bottlenecks or app-store submissions.

Worked with developers on a server-side scripting system that let logic-based mini-games and activities be prototyped quickly and deployed to all players without an app update. Monthly themes refresh on top of the same engine.

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