Owen Grieve is a game designer. He has about 14 years of experience across social, mobile, PC and console games.
He has experience of combat design, creative direction, and writing, but his specialisation is system and economy design – creating data-driven features, and incredible spreadsheets to manage and balance content.
He enjoys seeking out unnoticed problems and solving them, mentoring designers, and bridging the gaps between different discipline groups. He plays a lot of games. A lot.
He is currently looking for new opportunities and is available immediately.
Email: owengrieve@gmail.com
General Game Design
- Experienced in a wide range of genres, and of designing for different platforms
- Arena shooters, sports games, team FPS, casual arcade titles, real-time strategy, idle games, and more! Casual, social, competitive PvP – real-time and asynchronous -single-player… and more!
- Roughly speaking, I have spent 2 years working on social games for the web, 7 years in mobile games, and 5 years making games for PC / Consoles
- I play around 30-40 games per year, usually to completion – my creative process draws on a much broader palette of experiences than just the games I’ve previously worked on
- Critical eye for writing and reviewing design docs
- As a former software tester I have a knack for spotting edge cases, loopholes, and the like
- As an economy designer, I’m also sensitive to the long-term / large scale impact of new features
- I’m particularly fond of pressing designers to dig deeper when they write the word ‘random’ – do they really want TRUE randomness, or can we workshop a little pseudo-random logic to help shape the player’s experience?
Live Games
- Extensive experience working on live games
- Arena shooters, sports games, team FPS, casual arcade titles, real-time strategy, idle games, and more! Casual, social, competitive PvP – real-time and asynchronous -single-player… and more!
- Developing tools and processes to make updates faster, cheaper, and easier
- Working with engineers to develop smooth and effective data pipelines
- Creating spreadsheets that transform intuitive tuning inputs into exportable data tables
- Working with analytics in mind
- Defining what data we should collect, to inform feature tuning decisions
- Identifying other data we could collect, to inform future strategic decisions
- Devising engagement funnels for features
- Designing for A/B tests, and (gently) correcting common methodological misconceptions among non-experts
- Qualitative interpretation of analytics data – helping analysts to relate data trends to particular game updates, or changes in the wider market
- Designing events, seasonal updates, and live ops features
- Defining WHAT we will do, WHY we will do it, and HOW we will manage it
- Working with PMs to design backend tools to manage the live service features
- Bridging gaps between Product and Design teams
- Helping designers to relate their features to our KPIs
- Helping PMs to understand what the player experience of their ideas would be
- Mentoring other designers to design features with live service tools in mind
- Planning analytic events during feature design
- Structuring feature config data for flexible live data updates
- Designing features with the assumption that you will want to add more content, someday
Systems & Economy Design
- Flowcharts! Spreadsheets! The raw, primordial ichor of economy design!
- Compiling jumbled piles of design docs into a coherent economy flow
- Evaluating whether the current designs are fulfilling the metagame vision
- Designing (or redesigning) features to bridge the gaps between the vision and current reality
- Modelling the economy in spreadsheets, to simulate the player experience…
- …rearranging the model to create an intuitive balancing tool (ie. turn desired outputs into inputs)
- Good understanding of the underlying, abstract economic issues at play
- I’ve worked on a lot of different games and have a range of tools and mental models to draw from
- The main thing is usually to focus on time, rates of change, and inflation
- Lest we forget, I do have a degree in economics – I will sometimes make a novel observation and describe a problem in dry, academic terms that are not taken from a GDC video