ALEXIA MANDEVILLE

   Role: Co-Founder Bodeville, Game Designer
   Engine: Unity
   Platforms: iOS, Android, Steam
   Project: CEO on iOS
   Team Size: 2

Become Chief Emoji Officer using only emojis... without getting fired along the way. You're a new hire to Redify, a startup that loves changing the world! It's up to you to turn the company around and climb to the executive level by making decisions for the company. Work with a variety of unique co-workers and respond to their messages to navigate corporate politics in this unique twist on a visual novel.

Contributions

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Game Design, UI Design, and Art – This was a two person effort... Working with an engineer, I concepted the UI, developed UI in Figma, and prefabs and materials in Unity. I charted out game systems. I drew all the characters in Procreate. I made all the emojis in Figma. I wrote the story with my eng partner using Twine and Yarnspinner. Marketing – I contacted press and influencers to play our game, resulting in 5% response/posts as an outcome. I developed a following with our audience on social media, and did A/B testing with ads on Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit. Read more about this in my Medium writing.

This was our first game as a studio at Bodeville. Chief Emoji Officer, a text adventure, was initally just supposed to be shipped on Steam. But we released it on mobile platforms with an entirely new UI layout. Through our hard work, it was featured as Game of the Day and Best New Games in 150 countries and made #3 on top paid Casual Games. We needed a product as soon as possible to make our first dollar as a new studio. So we took about 4 months to create Chief Emoji Officer.

Emoji Design

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	Meaning – We chose a group of emojis that could have multiple meanings by picking our favorites from corporate america and asking other how they intepret them. Iinitally, we wrote the story with a thumbs up and thumbs down, but the meanings were too literal, and resulted in only binary choices and kept the story too linear. Style – Simple graphics, minimal black strokes, and easy to identify.

Writing

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Character Voices – Each character needed to be easily recognizable in their writing, since the main interface of the game was through story and chatting. To keep characters consistent, I outlined how each character elongated their vowels, if they made typos, their favorite emoji, how they capitalized words, if they had a lisp, how confident they came across, and how each of these personality traits came across in text. Choice Design – There are two types of choices in the game, ones that result in an emoji (ally choice at the end of a chapter) and ones that result in dialogue changes throughout the story. We implemented foreshadowing, feedback after a choice, distinct options offered by characters, and an outline of stakes so players felt that the choices they were making meaningfully impacted their experience. All of this was written into each character's dialogue.