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.

Tournament of Glory was the latest large feature released that I led the design and development of. Throughout its development were many meetings between myself and art/engineering, scheduled and led by me, to ensure the direction was consistent. The release of this feature led to roughly doubling player engagement with the competitive game mode.

I led DomiNations' two latest expansions, Drone Age and Automation Age. This required frequent interdepartmental collaboration and leadership, as well as an in-depth understanding of the code-side implementation of the game. I created concise documentation, edited existing documentation, and implemented the vast majority of the changes myself.

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 These troops were simply outdated and performed poorly in late-game battles.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/

Another significant contribution of mine was a new Leaderboard system. I collaborated with the team,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.

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