Scooby-Doo Monster Mayhem

Help Scooby-doo & the gang save crystal cove from monsters escaping the museum.

Scooby Doo: Monster Mayhem is a tower defense free to play mobile browser game where you help Scooby and the gang save townsfolk of Crystal Cove from monsters escaping the museum. I was the main point of contact during its development as game designer at Kuato Studios.

Play on Boomerang

Roles and Responsibilities

Main point of contact for system and overall game design.
Championing the creative vision, ensuring it remains true to the IP throughout development.
Understanding the target audience and what motivates them, deriving core pillars that support the overall vision.
Create multiple mechanics/systems working holistically and consistent with the game’s vision and pillars.
Collaborating with programmers, artists, producers, QA, and other roles within Kuato Studios and externally to ensure a multifaceted approach to the project’s design factoring the needs of all areas of development.
Proactively recognising design shortcomings or imbalances in game, proposing intuitive solutions within defined scope.
Helping other members of the project team to visualise the end experience and emotions the game is meant to evoke.
Maintaining robust and frequent communications with the project and design team.
Creating and maintaining vision and technical design documentation for reference and briefing, including proof-of-concept presentations, high level design summaries and detailed design schematics.
Mapping out the player journey.
Designing FTUE and in-game tutorials
Balancing in-game items, gameplay difficulty, economy and its meta systems based on the high level goals of different systems in the game.
Play testing & providing regular detailed feedback of builds, including UX and UI.
Sourcing, editing, and mixing sounds to match style and tone.
Understanding and adapting to the commercial and production goals throughout the project and designing within its parameters.
Taking part in technical discussions to identify and solve technical issues, including performance, memory usage, and cross-platform issues.
Maintaining up-to-date industry and market awareness.

Contributions

GDD and MVP Doc

Under the guidance of the design lead, I wrote a comprehensive design document to be used by both internal and external teams throughout development. This was written in a Confluence workspace, making it easier:

to find relevant sections for individual tasks
for version control
to update and maintain the document

Focusing solely on the core experience and features, I wrote a secondary MVP document to highlight the core elements of the game. This was used as a rough guide when proposing solutions to meet production scope throughout the project.

Sound Design

I sourced, edited and mixed sounds to be used in-game, matching the desired style and tone. Given that the game was in development, all sounds were created by imagining how it would play out in-game, using the design document as reference. I also created audio snippets to be used as a guide for how audios for each section of the game should sound like during gameplay.

Mockups

Throughout development, I created mockups and references to communicate the project vision to the internal and external team. Creating mockups also provided a starting point for further team collaborations to improve the product.

Balancing

I balanced in-game items, gameplay difficulty, economy and the game’s meta systems. Given that the game was in development, the first pass at balancing was done by imagining how it would play out in-game, using the design document as reference. Further balancing was done once the game was further in development, changing values via exposed scripts and testing until desired player experience was reached.

Testing

I regularly playtested builds throughout development, providing feedback using the design document, client feedback and desired player experience as reference. I also collaborated with artists, producers, programmers and the design team to provide solutions in line with scope and project goals.