Xavier Agulló

In October 2021 I joined the team of “Dragon City''. This project, originally released in 2012 for Facebook, is Socialpoint’s flagship title and has delighted millions of players during its 12 years (and counting!) existence. More importantly, the game stays strong and has ambitious plans for its future.

As a designer on a development squad I provided ideation, documentation, balancing and guidance for several new features. All under supervision of the lead designer and product leads. Some success stories include continuous imprvement of the “Battle Pass” or the implementation of the “Wizards’s Hollow” which became the top sink in the game for hard currency.

I also worked within the Live Ops team, where I helped optimize and automate many of the recurrent tasks to reduce errors and alleviate work on the team. Live Ops constitute the beating heart of the game and its main source of revenues. Therefore I gained an invaluable learning about how running operations at world-class level.

Working on a game like this entails its own challenges, whether it is technical debt, the quirks of “authoritative backend” or keeping the frail chain of knowledge as the team members invariably rotate over time. Also, being a successful game with over 1.5 millions DAU, every change in the game is carefully discussed and A/B tested, making things move slowly but steadily.

And, while I will never claim this to be a strength of mine, I’m in the right environment to improve my product sensitivity. This means measuring new features in terms of business return, or justifying design proposals through data. These are areas difficult to develop while in smaller games or prototypes as opposed to Dragon City which is a consolidated business.