Owen Grieve is a systems and economy designer, with 14+ years of experience working on live games of various genres and sizes, for mobile, PC and consoles. He has a degree in economics, and a masters in game design.

He likes to design features that are configured via data tables, to produce great combinatorial depth at low cost – using spreadsheets to model and balance the game, and manage complex collections of data. His other great passion is to sniff out systemic problems that are not on the team’s radar – to proactively seek out opportunities which are currently going unnoticed. He enjoys collaborating across disciplines to find low-cost wins, and mentoring other designers. In his spare time he enjoys cooking, spending time in his garden, and playing a lot of games.

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, platforms, and working contexts
  • Arena shooters, sports games, team FPS, casual arcade games, real-time strategy, idle games, and more!
  • Casual, social, midcore, competitive PvP (real-time and asynchronous), single-player… and more!
  • 2 years working on social games for the web, 7 years in mobile games, and 5 years making games for PC / Consoles
  • Large MNCs, small indie studios, co-development projects, publisher-contracted work, self-published games, from initial ideation through to launch, live service, and sunsetting
• 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 sensitive to the long-term / large scale impact of new features
  • Having worked on a lot of gacha-based games in the past, I’m a stickler when I see the word ‘random’ in a spec – I can sit with designers to discuss whether some pseudo-random logic would produce a better experience
  • Having worked on so many live games, I often urge designers to consider the cost/benefit analysis of their features – ie. are there ways to make this cheaper, more re-usable, or (if appropriate) open up new monetisation options?
• Flexible attitude
  • Game development doesn’t always go according to plan, and I try to anticipate this in my work – eg. designing features that can be quickly and easily adjusted and rebalanced, if something changes

Live Games

• Extensive experience working on live games
  • Every game I’ve worked on professionally has been a live service title
• 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 designers to design their 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 collections of design docs into a coherent economy flow diagram
  • 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 models to draw from
  • Even if I haven’t worked in your specific genre before, I’m PRETTY SURE I could figure it out
• I do have a degree in economics
  • I will sometimes make pseud observations about declining cross-elasticity of demand for magic swords, or what the prisoner’s dilemma can tell us about your matchmaking UX design
  • In case you’re curious: My dissertation was a study of economic altruism in World of Warcraft, which says something about how long I’ve had MMO economies on my mind