Favela Wars 2013

Favela Wars was, at its time, one of Brazil's largest and most ambitious games. An online, turn based, multiplayer strategy game, it took influences from titles such as X-Com and Final Fantasy Tactics to tell the story of a near-future dystopic Rio de Janeiro where drug cartels from the slums would wage open war against the police forces.

The game was built with a hybrid technology stack, where the main turn-based matches would take place in the (now extinct) Unity Web Player, whereas the HQ, where resource/unit management took place, used a web-based system, built on Ruby on Rails, HTML and Javascript. Both layers communicated by a common server and the somewhat esoteric integration worked surprisingly well.

Acting as Lead Designer/Creative Director, I took the charge of designing the game's high-level systems (character classes, lore, skill-tree, evolution curve, equipment, etc.) and well as designing and prototyping the game and metagame's UX via wireframes, user flows, IA maps, spreadsheets and many other tools. The game also was hooked to Google Analytics and Crazy Egg, which provided valuable feedback for the team's decision-making process.

The project was a massive undertaking, brought to light in a two year span by a reduced crew of first 15, then 8 people. A pretty impressive and full-featured playable beta was released, tested and improved with an audience of 180K players, but unfortunately the game needed further development to reach its optimal state, and the company was unable to secure the necessary funding.