Click through to view the full design on Miro
Design Case Study
Self-Directed | Social Progression for a Live-Service Shooter | 2026
Live-service shooters are exceptional at the moment-to-moment, but the social fabric underneath often goes unrecognized by the systems. Players can spend years in the same friend group and the game never sees the relationship. This concept makes the friend group itself the unit of progression, something that grows, carries visible identity, and is worth coming back to, without selling power or leaning on heavy narrative.
- Built shared group goals that ask friends to play together, so progression rewards cohesion rather than headcount or grinding
- Designed a worn group-identity layer (a chosen emblem plus earned cosmetic trophies) that signals what a group has accomplished together as a form of social expression
- Treated child safety as a structural pillar, designing the system as closed and friend-only with no open-recruitment funnel, and rejecting absence-punishing mechanics that would be indefensible aimed at a young audience
- Scoped the concept end to end into a discipline-by-discipline work breakdown (art, audio, engineering, UI, UX) with time estimates and dependencies, framed so a production team could read it and begin work