Games Portfolio
Wordle migration, 2022.
As the lead producer on the a highly-publicized Wordle migration, my New York Times Games core team of 4 successfully rebranded and refreshed the iconic word game to redirect 20M+ daily active users in the span of 7 days. The road wasn’t easy: with the whole world playing or otherwise invested in the game’s success, every move we made was under large public scrutiny. As the producer on this special project, I had to balance competing priorities from leadership, editorial, marketing, customer care, DevOps, & legal to relieve pressure on the development team. Due to the massive reach of the game, public comms were of the essence. I partnered with the NYT Games General Manager, public relations specialist, the player support director and community manager to craft a digestible FAQ page players could reference in lieu of flooding the customer service team with questions. Finally, I created, distributed, and managed the release day planning & day-of coordination to ensure traffic was only redirected when the team felt confident in the stability of the product.
Spelling Bee Features & Live Ops, 2022.
As producer of the Gameplay optimizations team at The New York Times Games, I partnered with the product manager to lead a 7-person design & development team for The Spelling Bee. With a focus on shipping monthly upgrades, we deployed three substantial features that increased player habituation & skill improvement:
Stats modal: highlighting past-game performance to encourage steady player improvement, registration, & conversion.
Today’s Hints: partnered with the editorial team on adding a menu item to a new forum coaching players to master the game and uplevel their ranking in days to come.
Community: elevated an editorial initiative to create an official Spelling Bee gamer community by adding a menu item to the daily blog post within the app.
AdventurImagen: Zork revival, 2022.
What if Zork, the classic 1970s text-based adventure game met the image-generation capabilities of AI? That was the premise of the AdventurImagen R&D team. We leveraged Google’s AI technology (Lambda & Imagen) to provide custom user-prompted illustrations as our player solved puzzles to complete their journey.
On this project, I championed Agile practices as lead producer of the
Research & Development track, a gamification coalition of
developers, designers & animators. View our demo.
