Arknights
2022.7 - 2024.7
Arknights is a popular mobile tower defense game developed by Hypergryph and published by Yostar. It was first released in China in May 2019 and has gained a global following. The game is known for its captivating storyline, impressive character design, and challenging strategic gameplay. The game has over one million active players and the average DAU is about six hundred thousand.
I have been a system designer for Arknights since August 2022. My primary role is to employ commercialized ideals in game design to create in-game activities and arrange the release of game content to constantly give players new incitement in the game and optimize our players' experience.
2023 April Fool Activity
April Fool's activity is the first in-game activity I designed for Arknights and the activity had over 80% participation rate with a rating of 8/10 on Arknights' fan society website. In this activity, I was responsible for the mechanic design, reward system design, and the overall quality of the final presentation of the activity.
April Fool is a holiday suitable for small and relaxing activities, which gives the player a break from the serious storytelling that Arknights originally had, and can also give the player a feeling of being closer to the designer since the activity is more like a "joke" made by the designer. In this case, I designed the whole activity's vibe to be leisurely and enjoyable, which does not require too many skills but rather involves quite a lot of performance. I also embedded the reward system into the activity itself, so that players will experience a smooth reward-collecting experience without giving them too much pressure of how much reward they are going to get after the activity.
In this activity, the main mechanic is to take pictures using a new character U-Official in the levels and use these pictures to help U-Official perform live streams. Based on the pictures players took and the order they chose to use the pictures during the live streams, there will be different endings for U-Official. In this activity design, I combined a unique mechanic of photo-shooting inside the tower defense level with a special game performance of live streaming. The photo-shooting mechanic made the level less challenging than the other regular tower defense levels in Arknights, and the live-streaming process helped build up the narrative.
2023 April Fool Activity Main Page
Playthrough Video of the April Fool Activity
Main Storyline Promotion Activity
In Arknights, the main storyline is a series of levels and stories permanently sit inside the game, while completing it can let players collect a considerably large amount of rewards, players are more attracted by the levels and stories in our side storyline because they update seasonally and the reward has a time limit.
The main storyline promotion activity is designed to increase the clearance rate of the main storyline levels and motivate players to get to the most updated main story. In this promotion activity, I was responsible for designing a whole reward release system. Before the promotion, only 50,000 players finished all levels in the main storyline, and the number increased to 150,000 after the activity.
One difficulty I encountered while designing this activity was how to motivate the players to get to more levels without actually giving the player too much reward, since it will cause inflation and decrease the actual value the the reward. I solved this problem with the design of a segmented reward structure. I segregate the main storyline into different segments based on its episode and increase the reward bit by bit when the player gets to the next level or the next episode. The reward was released in an exponential curve: the newer the episode is, the more the reward they are going to get. This helped control the total amount of reward given to the player.
2023 4.5 Anniversary Side-story Design
Arknights has four special celebrations events in a year, corresponding to four different seasons. In these events, we will release some important characters and large activities. 4.5 Anniversary was one of the special events this year. I am responsible for the gameplay and the quality of the whole performance of the side-story activity released in this event.
For this activity, I designed an outer system gameplay of music tunning to reflect the music theme in the side story's narrative. Players can collect some special music notes by completing the side-story levels, and then use the notes to synthesize music and tune the music into different styles. The music can be used as triggers to more hidden narratives for the players to learn more about the side story and the world depicted in Arknights. The outer system is designed to connect the levels and the narratives, to create a cohesive effect and freshness for the players, since the levels and narrative in our regular side-story activities are often separated and independent.
4.5 Anniversary Side Story KV
Playthrough of the Outer System Gameplay