Alec Heyer

I joined Big Huge Games as a QA Tester on DomiNations and Arcane Showdown in January 2019. Later, moved to the Product Management team to learn more about Live Ops, and furthered my career in by joining the Design team in early 2021.

One of my most impactful responsibilities was both the transition, and now the upkeep, of DomiNations into a more Season-Driven model. I coordinate with both the Community and Product teams to deliver exciting Seasonal content in the form of several different forms of Events to demonstrably increase retention as well as stabalize revenue earnings. Through leveraging analytics to gauge player engeagement, I have developed and released several iterations since its initial release, each of which has positively boosted player sentiment and engagement with Seasons as a whole.

I was also in charge of a combat rebalance to approximately half the troops in the game. These troops were simply outdated and performed poorly in late-game battles. I changed functionality, stats, and intended roles to ensure each troop had their place in all players' armies. This update had a vast meta-changing impact, and continues to be a wildly positive impact on Combat in DomiNations. Details can be found here: https://xen.bighugegames.com/index.php?threads/dominations-v9-12-update.28054/

One of my largest contributions was leading the team in the implementation of Drone Age. This required a large amount of cross-team communication and documentation restructuring, as well as an in-depth understanding of the game's internal structure. I was in charge of not only delegating and organizing work to other designers and artists, but also implemented a large portion of it myself.

Another significant contribution of mine was a new Leaderboard system. With limited design-oversight, I designed and led the development of a system widely loved by the player base. This feature required frequent collaboration between Design and other departments like Engineering and Art. Leaderboards also had specific retention goals on top of "player sentiment" goals, both of which were successfully delivered upon.