Designer of the rabbit warren feature. This feature’s launch, marked Farmville 2’s highest revenue day. Player’s were motivated by the exciting and fun rewards that were designed for this feature.

Having seen a weakness in the appeal of recently introduced “premium crops”, I took initiative to introduce a truly desirable premium crop (the purple dragon carrot), which not only did better supported that feature, but also gave ample motivation to engage with and complete the prerequisite rabbit warren tasks.

The feature also included a unique interactive decoration, that allowed your stored rabbits to pop up in individually placed rabbit holes. This set the new bar for premium crops, and continued my trend of unique and engaging farm decorations. I was personally very proud of this feature, and personally commissioned a purple dragon carrot cake to be made and brought to the office for celebration of the feature’s launch.

Ratchet & Clank was both a critical and commercial success, winning many awards, including two game of the year awards from IGN. In its old age, it continues to get internet attention from people who find emulatable versions online.

Ratchet & Clank was an iteration on my previous success with “Spider-Man 2: The Hero Returns”, which our publishers at Sony thought well enough of, that they specifically asked for me to be assigned as the designer on this project. Despite having no interaction with Insomniac, I designed and helped deliver a very faithful adaptation of the franchise.

Responsibilities included:

• Designing the tilesets, and building levels form them
• Planning and maintaining the asset-list
• Designing the weapons, enemies, and bosses
• Writing much of the dialog
• Working with the composer on SFX and music
• Running morning standups
• Negotiating deliverable features with the publisher

Designer of the Mud Wallow feature, which successfully monetized fences for the very first time. Although premium fences had been offered before, they never generated meaningful revenue. This feature succeeded in part due to its especially creative and engaging thematic decorations.

The mud wallow gave players a building with incorporated fences, that could connect to other fences a player owns. Combined with the decorative mud plots, players could make a massive muddy pig enclosure, that pigs spent all day roaming and rolling in.

This was the first feature where I felt that I had found my unique specialty among the team’s designers, as creating especially novel decoration items, to attract greater player engagement.

Worked on iPhone and android adaptations of Namco titles, in secret, before the announcement of either phone. These included Pac-Man and Ms Pac-Man, which were planned for - and successfully released as - launch titles for both phones. Using prototype devices, I designed and tuned the “swipe” style controls for the game.

While working on these projects, I had to become the company expert on Apple’s iOS style guide, and was asked to create a Namco internal smartphone terminology and best practices guide. This guide included much of apple’s design requirements, touch screen practices and terminology, but also accelerometer practices and terminology (which was all new to mobile games, at the time).

Snoopy is a truly one button feature-phone game released in 2007, vastly predating flappy bird, and based on the peanuts license. Another team had made a previous attempt at a snoopy flying game, that didn’t work out… and I was asked to come up with a new direction. I was inspired by simple “helicopter” flash games (which play much like flappy bird) but wanted to add a more gentle curve to the motion, giving the sensation of pulling up from a dive, and of gently gliding.

Snoopy played great and was very novel for its time (selling well and winning at least one award). But the biggest compliment was that in 2011, ustwo released “Whale Trail” for iPhone… which replicates many of Snoopy’s uncommon mechanics, and suggests that the developers were using it as reference (if not also big fans). Examples of shared mechanics include: parabolic flight, trails of collectables, storm cloud obstacles, gusts, and looping.

Namco was eager to create original feature-phone titles for some of the licenses they owned (or could easily aqcuire), and gave their designers the responsibility to make pitches each week for a different predefined license or theme. Several of my pitches were very well received by management, but the company lacked the courage to follow through with their plan, when classic ports were still reliable. Ask me about Chi-Burger!

In advance of Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary, Namco held an internal competition for all employees to pitch their ideas for a new take on Pac-Man for mobile (at a company with hundreds of testers). My ghost puzzler pitch was one of three favorites selected, and the only pitch to be prototyped.