Andrew McAtominey

As Level Design Craft Lead, I work on core gameplay and I lead the level design initiatives on Angry Birds 2.

 

The mandate for my role is to:

• Oversee new core gameplay initiatives

• Establish and maintain a level design pipeline

• Demystify and improve performance of live game features

• Grow & manage the level design team

Project Responsibilities:

Gameplay Design

• I was the Lead Gameplay & Level Designer on the Angry Birds 2: Space biome. This involved prototyping and designing the core gameplay in four weeks with a developer, and planning and maintaining the schedule of the creation and reviewing of all level content with level design team.

• I support the gameplay design pillars and decision making for new gameplay initiatives (new biomes & more).

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​Level Design Craft​

• Established a level design pipeline consisting of a level planning and release strategy, design best-practices in levels across the game, team workflow & the introduction of level review processes, and how to work with data pre-and-post release.

  • The goal was to build a pipeline on par with industry standards that could make our content releases reliable, high quality, and provide space to tackle new initiatives.

  • In doing so, I built a liveops content buffer to put the team months ahead of releases to avoid stress and context switching for the team, develop consistency in planning, prevent design from becoming a blocker, and promoting quality.

• Design new Unity tooling for level creation and I built & own the tooling backlog.

• Once established, I mentor and delegate roles like team planning and feature ownership to junior members of the team.

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Feature Performance

• Stabilised and grew several liveops features key to studio revenue, working with Product and Analytics crafts.

  • This involves investigating the performance performance of various live features and their respective design process, defining new metrics & feature success criteria to improve design goals and better evaluate how and why features perform.

• Designed various data tools with the BI team to visualise feature performance at a glance, realtime tracking for live features, and a searchable level database on our cloud platform.

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