Mafia Wars

I built and managed the Mafia Wars 2 design team from prototype to launch, a mobile MMO with innovative game play built on a beloved Zynga IP. I designed the UX vision, best practices and UI style guides from the ground up, with the process I implemented later used as a reference company wide on how to support an innovative game concept from scratch from a UX perspective. I also directed art pipe line for marketing, logo and app store assets.

Mafia Wars started as a “start-up” game team inside of Zynga with goal to reimagine the Mafia Wars brand (massively successful Facebook / web game) into a modern mobile hit. Below you will see the “proof of concept” phase where we launched a prototype in 8 weeks to test drive a “new to mobile, worldwide” gameplay mechanic only before seen on some of the most social and complex PC MMOs (Eve Online). Said mechanics included massively cooperative alliance play and territory control.

One of the most challenging pieces of this project was supporting the UX production of the project on such a skeleton timeline, with enough fidelity to get proper signal from the playtest. The playtest was so successful Zynga all but shut down because the gameplay was so engaging and after, the innovative game was green lit to go into production phases. You will see fuller outlines of the prototype, and production phases below.

This was my first true lead designer role, but I was hired to lead the team after my proven leadership skills on the handoff of FarmVille 2 to our studio in India and my experience doing rapid prototypes for another internal game concept team within the casino division of Zynga. To this day, this is one of the projects that truly defines me as a designer and leader, where, due to the complexity of the project and the opportunity to step up, I leveled up my skill set dramatically, both in design as well as leadership. I continue leveraging those skills today.

Tools

Unity, Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, Unity, JIRA, SourceTree

Platforms

Android, iOS

The Prototype

With a small team, a dream, and a product that would make any UX person blush. We were a team on a mission to get the green light.

My efforts as UX lead at this time were divided between:

  1. Build output - This was rough needs-to-get-done work to support the dev team. Everyone expected it to be as quick and dirty as possible. The name of the game was get as much in as possible as quickly as possible to support rapid iteration rather than perfection. I choked my ego to move quickly while taking notes and planning for future iterations.

  2. XFN collaboration - At this time the game team was so small that almost everyone could be in feature meetings. With many different perspectives getting room to collaborate many of the crazy ideas for the game (such as territory control) came out of these early collab meetings. This culture of collaboration across disciplines stuck even after we exited our prototype phase.

  3. Dreaming & building what would be Mafia Wars UI/UX - Recruiting/Hiring a team of designers. Creating standards for design. Setting aspirational goals for the visual. All in their infancy at this phase but helped along by collaborating with my XFN partners in the studio.

Pre-Production

The project was greenlit, but there was a lot to still figure out. The team dedicated itself to another cycle of prototype - meaning the UX & game design going into the build were “temporary” and expected to be radically or entirely changed but the backend would be built for real this time.

At this stage efforts as UX lead were divided as such:

  1. Creating UX Patterns - We wireframed the entire game and built a second and even more massive playable prototype. This extensive wireframing helped solve tricky UX issues early and establish clear, reusable UX patterns that could be carried across the game.

  2. UX Team development & unification with MW team - The Mafia Wars UX team was starting to grow. With that, so was our design perspective and influence as a team. I could no longer attend every feature pod meeting - so a UX member was part of each pod and responsible for being the voice for the UX team in that meeting. So it was my responsibility to make sure that my designers had the right tools (documentation) and training (1:1 time/mentorship) in our vision and standards to navigate designing and speaking for me if I was otherwise occupied (probably in a leads meeting 😡).

Production

The push to the finish line!! or so we thought..

My focus areas as lead:

  1. Visual Development - While we had spent years (yikes) building the best UX possible it was finally time to add a UI that could continue to be highly legible and clean, but bring in a hint of 'urban crime' flavor that the Mafia Wars brand needed.

  2. FTUE (first-time user experience) - As any game or app maker knows this is a doozy.. and typically takes the UX team going click by click to design the first-time user experience. This was a team effort to try to explain how to play this massive game.

  3. Brand & Marketing - This was an area that surprised me as a lead, but as the UX lead I spent a large amount of time and effort working with the Branding and Marketing teams at Zynga during our Soft Launch and leading up to what we thought would be our Global launch.

Click through of the final FTUE

A section of the MW brand guide. It could have been very easy to do too much with the mafia wars UI, instead we kept things simple by just adding grunge textures to certain elements. It added just enough flare, without getting in the way of legibility.