The brief
The studio was pitching for the official mobile game of a globally famous epic-fantasy TV saga, and put me on a design exercise to prove out the concept. The mandate: a collection-RPG with real-time, light-tactical combat, built around the saga’s sworn frontier order — the soldiers who hold a great wall against the inhuman things that come from the cold beyond. It had to satisfy a lore-obsessed fanbase, stay legible to lapsed and new players on mobile, and become a daily brand touchpoint that could run for years.
Hard constraints
- Only five marquee figures from the saga could be licensed as named, actor-portrayed characters — every other unit had to be original.
- No altered or obscured actor likenesses, and canon/timeline conflicts had to be avoided entirely.
- The order is canonically a closed, all-male institution — a real tension against roster breadth and collection variety.
- Authentic enough for superfans; readable enough for everyone else.
My approach
I refused to anchor the game to a single year. Pinning it to one point on the timeline would have meant fighting the canon forever — every event a continuity argument, every character a question of before or after. So I framed the whole game as a living atlas: you don’t play a person, you play the order itself as an institution, touring the world across every era through a “memory-tree” vision conceit that let any character or moment appear on the board without breaking canon. That single move turned the licensing constraints from a cage into a feature — and handed the live game decades of content runway.
The second decision was a values call: lead with brand integrity over the obvious money-makers. I argued for a roster weighted toward the frontier and its lore rather than stacking the five marquee slots with the most bankable faces. The bet was that press and the hardcore fanbase would read the restraint as respect, the licensor would trust us with it, and that trust would lift every downstream metric more than a cynical roster ever could.
Stop trying to be canon. Play the institution, not a person — and the whole world becomes a living atlas you can keep adding to for years.
The design
Collection as a habit engine
Acquisition ran through four time-gated vectors — recruitment, unit perfection, resource gathering, and PvE patrols — each dripping incremental progress every session, so there was always a reason to check back in. A deep trait system let players optimise units, with an unlock lifecycle that deliberately hid the optimisation layer until a player had promoted their first unit and was ready to meet it. The north star was goal density: a constant, legible sense of progress on every system, with passive research boosts triggered by ordinary play so no action ever felt wasted.
Real-time, light-tactical combat
The combat brief was “less twitch, more tactics.” Roughly two-minute, five-versus-five character battles with a finite ability deck — used-once tactics rather than a constantly recycling hand — so every decision carried weight. Commanders brought a small kit and one high-impact moment to time; wins could come by elimination, morale break, or conditional objective. I pushed for about a 70/30 strategic-to-tactical split: deep enough for theorycrafters, calm enough to play one-handed on a commute.
Death as legacy — the signature system
The system I was proudest of: units can permanently die in opt-in challenge content — but death isn’t a loss. A fallen unit becomes a legacy scroll that passes its traits, and even its heritage, to the next recruit. I gated it behind a valor currency earned only when the server confirms a real win or loss, so the stakes stay honest and players can’t game it by force-quitting. Because permadeath is a genuine retention risk, I designed it with an explicit fallback: if players reject it in testing, the same loop runs on a cooldown-and-reward model instead — no economy rework required.
Seasonal events and a calmer monetization
Live-ops ran on seasonal event blocks with a prophecy-style teaser→announce rhythm, using in-world symbols to herald what was coming. For monetization I argued against the gacha “last chance to roll” pressure and toward a battlepass framed as guaranteed, already-earned rewards you bank by playing — scarcity from the season’s timing, not from randomness. Three themed tracks (currency, research, cosmetics) layered rewards on top of habits players already had.
Tradeoffs & decisions
- Brand integrity vs. obvious revenue — chose a lore-weighted roster over stacking the marquee slots with the most bankable faces, betting trust would out-earn cynicism.
- Permadeath stakes vs. retention risk — kept the emotional weight of losing a unit, but de-risked it with the legacy-scroll loop and a tested fallback.
- Canon fidelity vs. content freedom — the living-atlas framing traded strict timeline accuracy for years of conflict-free content and a cleaner relationship with the license.
- Authenticity vs. accessibility — real-time light-tactical combat aimed to satisfy superfans without demanding hardcore execution on a phone.
What I’d validate next
The pitch rests on three unproven bets, and I’d prototype to retire them in order. First, the moment-to-moment combat — build it, then lock the three experience pillars against real inputs before anything else is committed. Second, the death-and-legacy loop — does it read as meaningful stakes or as punishment? It’s the single biggest retention risk, and the fallback exists for a reason. Third, the collection cadence — are the per-session increments frequent and satisfying enough to build the daily habit the entire “brand touchpoint” thesis depends on?