Deer Hunter 2018 is a live mobile hunting game built around progression depth and event-driven engagement. By the time I joined, the product was matured with a dedicated player base, established content pipelines, and a team that had been shipping for years.
Design Approach
The principle I kept coming back to on Deer Hunter was rationale before aesthetics.
In a studio where design had historically meant visual execution, the shift wasnt about better screens. It was about showing the team why a particular direction made sense, and it included walking through the reasoning, the player context, the trade-offsbefore jumping into how it should look. Every decision I presented came with its logic attached.
This changed how conversations happened. Instead of reviewing a screen and asking whether it looked right, the team started asking whether the approach was right.
Early Player Clarity
When I joined, one of my early side project was about how new players are interacting with the system and they were dropping before the core loop clicked. The game has depth, weapon upgrades, hunting regions, event systems. But users were getting churned in the early journey before ever seeing them.
This is where I started learning the basics of data science. I spent time in Tableau dashboards, tracing where players fell off, what sessions looked like before a drop, and which early moments correlated with longer retention. The design work started before any wireframes, it started with understanding the data well enough to pitch a case for why the onboarding pipeline needed attention.
Getting the work prioritized meant presenting to stakeholders with specific observations and proposed solutions, not just flagging a problem. The onboarding redesign that followed was shaped by what the data revealed about when players lost direction, and the design focused on making the early game feel like a guided introduction to the full experience rather than a stripped-down version of it.
Competitive Event Systems
Beyond the base game, Deer Hunter ran rotating events that kept the live experience fresh. I worked on two competitive formats that targeted different segments of the player base.
Design direction behind these systems was to keep it tied to the core loop while maintaining the motivations systems associated to competitve events.
