A sprawling Social City metropolis with landmarks, parks, and a Ferris wheel

Work

City-building social game

Organization
Playdom / Disney Interactive
Role
Team Lead
Years
2009–2014
Platforms
Facebook

Social City is a city-building game for social networks, made at Playdom, which Disney acquired in 2010. Players build and grow a city alongside their friends, and its many animation easter eggs tuck small stories into a genre that usually has very little story. Social City won the Game Developers Choice Online Award for Best Social Network Game in 2010.

My Role

I was team lead on Social City. I was an original member of Playdom’s Eugene studio, which grew from 3 people to more than 40, and later became head of game design as senior manager of game design at Disney Interactive Social Games.

I worked with the art team to establish the game’s style, and to tell stories through small animations inside the buildings that changed from month to month. I built the entire economy and the live game data spreadsheets, tested progression and the economy, and fine-tuned the new-user flow through endless iteration.

As Facebook’s game platform kept evolving, I rapidly designed and deployed new monetization and social features to keep pace. Throughout, I worked with creative directors Steve Meretzky and Raph Koster to fine-tune the design and monetization.

Social City’s success was a major factor in Disney’s decision to acquire Playdom.

Build a Block

A New Neighborhood Every Visit

Social City’s building art, laid out on the game’s isometric grid. Each visit builds a different neighborhood from more than fifty of the original sprites.

A design sheet of building states for a factory, a burger restaurant, and a house: construction, idle, working, harvestable, rotten, and messy, each with its mouseover bubble (“Click to Build!”, “5h 34m”, “Ready!”, “Expired!”, “Messy!”), plus timer and queued versions
Building states, from construction to harvest, spoilage, and cleanup
A player's city, with a giant bunny statue among the buildings
A Social City neighborhood with an Eiffel Tower replica, a windmill, and a Ferris wheel
An early mockup of the build menu, offering houses and office towers for coins and cash, each adding population every two days, below a street with a movie theater and a burger restaurant
An early UI mockup, before the final art style
An early 3D art test of a city block, with a hotel, a park with a fountain, a parking lot, and two houses on grey streets
An art style test, October 2009