eCricket

The problem

Cricket games tend to pick a side: either the feel of the shot or the depth of the squad. eCricket needed both, and it needed the two to talk to each other so that a card you earned in the meta changed how a delivery felt in your hands.

What I owned

Core gameplay feel end to end: batting, bowling and fielding, the timing windows, shot selection, difficulty and the AI opposition that makes a single over feel like a contest. On top of that, the Ultimate Team layer: cards, traits, synergy, fatigue, form and squad building, plus Away Games, PvP defence squads, player-created missions and the seasonal ladders that give all of it a calendar.

The system or decision

The decision that shaped everything was to let the meta reach into the moment-to-moment game through a small number of legible levers rather than a large number of hidden ones. A trait had to be something a player could feel on the next ball, not a percentage buried in a tooltip. That constraint drove the card design, the fatigue and form model, and how difficulty responds to squad strength instead of fighting it.

Status

Closed beta. I led the design team through the beta and mentored more than seven designers along the way. The game has not shipped publicly, so I will not claim outcomes it has not had yet.