Overview
Platform: Tools Used: Duration: Team Size: Role: |
Rise of Heroes: Survival is a mobile 4X strategy game set in a mythological fantasy world, blending Egyptian, Greek, and Norse legends with light RPG character collection. Players build and upgrade their city, recruit powerful gods and heroes, train armies, and compete against thousands of players on a vast open-world map.
As a Senior Game Designer, my role spanned across multiple pillars of the project:
Core Systems Design → Designed and balanced key 4X mechanics: city building, resource production, technology trees, troop training, and world exploration.
Hero & Combat Design → Defined hero roles, skill progression, troop synergies, and PvE/PvP combat systems, ensuring each hero delivered meaningful tactical impact.
Progression & Economy Design → Built meta-progression systems, from building upgrades and tech research to hero gacha, star promotion, and resource economies.
Alliance & Social Systems → Contributed to the Alliance system design, including rally mechanics, shared buffs, alliance territory, and competitive world objectives.
Onboarding & FTUE Design → Helped craft the early player experience, guiding new users through tutorial quests, adventure stages, and interactive events like Cerberus battles.
Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration → Worked closely with product, art, engineering, and narrative teams to align gameplay features with visual style, technical requirements, and story goals.
Mentoring & Team Support → Provided feedback to fellow designers, reviewed systems documentation, and supported design reviews to ensure quality and cohesion.
Throughout development, I focused on creating systems that balance depth with approachability — ensuring core 4X players feel challenged while new players are smoothly introduced to complex mechanics through narrative-driven onboarding, quests, and adventure stages.
Detailed Info
My biggest contribution to Rise of Gods: Survival was shaping the core player experience across systems, progression, and combat. From the early prototyping phase, I worked on the design of key systems like base building, resource management, and technology research, ensuring that the foundation of the 4X gameplay felt both deep and approachable.
Combat Design
Designed and balanced core PvE and PvP combat systems, ensuring that hero abilities, unit types, and combat calculations created meaningful tactical choices.
Created hero progression mechanics, including skill unlocks, ascension, and upgrades, carefully balancing impact across rarity tiers.
Developed encounter pacing for both early- and mid-game, aiming to deliver exciting “peaks” alongside steady resource challenges.
World Design
Shaped the open world structure, including resource nodes, exploration incentives, and PvE combat encounters across the map.
Designed world event systems like the boss invasions, integrating light action mechanics to break up core 4X gameplay and reward engagement.
Worked on Alliance objectives and competitive structures, defining how guilds interact with key landmarks and territories for long-term competition.
Economy Balancing
Balanced in-game resource flows, including farming, gathering, and production rates, to maintain engaging short- and long-term goals.
Tuned meta-progression systems (building upgrades, tech research, hero growth) to ensure rewarding player investment without unbalancing core gameplay.
Worked closely with product and data teams to align economy systems with player retention and monetization strategies, ensuring fairness and depth.
Hero & Character Design
Designed hero acquisition and progression systems, including gacha unlocks, hero fragments, star promotion, and skill upgrades.
Balanced hero specialties across troop types (Spearman, Archer, Shieldman, Cavalry), ensuring each hero offered unique strategic value in PvE and PvP.
Collaborated on skill design for gods and heroes, progressively unlocking abilities to deepen player mastery and team-building choices.
Player Retention & Re-Engagement
Helped define re-engagement loops through daily quests, event cycles, and reward systems like free gachas and looping activities (Royal Chambers, Divine Power, and more).
Balanced seasonal milestone systems (e.g., Monument progress) to offer meaningful long-term goals for alliances and individual players.
Designed reward pacing to maintain excitement, balancing short-term wins with longer-term investment.
Onboarding & Player Experience
Helped craft the FTUE (First-Time User Experience), including tutorial quests, early adventure stages, and narrative cutscenes.
Designed chapter quests and progressive world unlocks to guide players smoothly into complex 4X mechanics without overwhelming them.
Alliance & Social Systems
Designed competitive alliance features, including occupation of world structures (Sacred Grounds, Gates, Silver City) and reward mechanics.
Contributed to alliance territory design, rally mechanics, donation and help systems, and communal progression features like Alliance Technology and Shops.
Supported social engagement tools, including chat, communal gifting, and alliance events, to drive long-term retention and cooperation.
Monetization
Designed and balanced premium currencies, gacha systems, IAP bundles, and VIP progression, ensuring they felt valuable without compromising core gameplay integrity.
Integrated monetization hooks naturally into player progression, offering meaningful incentives through subscription plans, premium rewards, and special offers.
Worked closely with product stakeholders to align monetization design with player psychology, retention strategies, and fair-play principles.
Collaboration & Ownership
Served as primary point of contact on multiple systems, driving vision, documentation, and iteration.
Collaborated with art, engineering, and narrative teams to ensure gameplay systems were supported visually, technically, and thematically.
Provided feedback and mentorship to junior designers, helping uphold quality and consistency across the project.