Case study · Shipped
Gear Inc. systems work
Progression, meta-game, difficulty and monetisation systems across Angry Birds Match, MyVegas Bingo and Football Puzzle Champions.
Store capture.
The problem
Three live titles with different audiences and the same underlying question: how do you keep a casual player progressing without the progression turning into a wall or a wallet check. Each game had its own history, its own tuning debt, and its own team.
What I owned
Progression and meta-game systems, RPG-style upgrades and abilities, dynamic difficulty and pacing, and the monetisation and backend tuning that sat underneath all of it, across Angry Birds Match, MyVegas Bingo and Football Puzzle Champions. I led a design group of more than eight people spread across those titles.
The system or decision
The common thread was a dynamic difficulty approach with explicit guard rails: a floor so the game never became a formality, a ceiling so it never became a punishment, and a pacing model that decided when the game should let the player feel the difference. Upgrades and abilities were designed as the player’s visible answer to difficulty rather than a separate collection game. On the monetisation side, the rule was that every paid shortcut had to be a shortcut through something the free path could still finish.
Status
Shipped. The titles went live and were updated through their LiveOps calendars while I was there. The specific numbers belong to Gear Inc. and its partners, so this page sticks to what I built and why.