World of Battles: Morning Star
A free-to-play fantasy MMORTS at Frogwares — two-year run, my first F2P and my first competitive multiplayer.
After Deep Shadows and the early Frogwares hidden-object work, this was different territory: player-versus-player strategy with persistent progression, premium units, and the F2P balance problem that comes with selling power. Three distinct pieces of design work landed on me.
Master unit redesign
The premium roster from beta had clear issues — abilities that weren’t interesting, abilities that were too complicated to use, abilities that were mechanically redundant against each other. I led the redesign of the whole class.
The method I worked out for it got its own writeup: The Macaroni Method — a four-axis coordinate system that maps each ability onto the game’s load-bearing mechanics (Triangle, Damage, Movement, Visibility) and reads the gaps. The Giants — design overview is a preserved section of the resulting GDD.
UI and UX overhaul
At one point we rebuilt every interface in the game from scratch — menus, HUD, dialogs, flows, the lot. I owned the UX and structure end-to-end.
That meant full Photoshop mockups for every screen: composition, information hierarchy, interaction patterns, state transitions. The artist on the team drew the final visual layer on top of those mockups — the visual style was theirs, the structural layer was mine. Working at that fidelity made the handoff clean: the artist could focus on look without having to invent flow.
Battle system balancing
Unit stats, AP costs, counter-triangle relationships, ability tuning. Standard work for a strategy game, with the F2P twist: master units had to feel worth unlocking without breaking the competitive ladder for free players. That tension — selling power without breaking PvP — is the hard part of F2P competitive design.
What I took from it
First F2P, first competitive multiplayer, first time owning UX end-to-end. Three new disciplines on one project. The master-unit work outlasted the game itself — the coordinate-system method I worked out there is still in my toolkit.