Xavier Agulló

Everyone at Socialpoint felt “World Chef” deserved a second attempt, “WC has good ingredients… but we need to find the perfect sauce!”. And that is how “Tasty Town” was born.

The leadership of Social Point felt we had learned how to make this type of game. However, the two original game designers from “World Chef” were tossed aside for the direction of the new game. One of them was moved into another project and, in my case, I was demoted …or that’s how it felt when I was out of the preproduction stage for the new game. The leadership team grew exponentially with decisions led by the product owner, lead game designer, a producer and up to three product managers. My new responsibilites involved mainly writing documentation along with the new design intern.

My contributions to “World Chef” were notable but it turns out I failed to communicate, report and align with the stakeholders and, consequently, didn’t earn the trust required to step up in the new project. Things turned worse when, after a few months, I expressed my disagreement with the direction of the project and presented some alternate proposals. This led to some turmoil and even personal conflict with my superiors, but it never spilled into the team. I stayed in the project for a while but moved into another department before the game was released world-wide.

“Tasty Town” slightly improved ARPU over “World Chef”, but at the expense of retention and counted with overall worse KPI. This was a disappointment for what was a long, expensive project built upon a solid base. In my opinion the game felt disjointed and some decisions (like the non-linear unlocking of content) not only worsened the player experience but the control of the economy on the developer side.

Despite all this personal drama, “Tasty Town” succeeded on many fronts. The updated UI/UX was first class, the social layer worked great, the art was gorgeous and the overall experience was really polished and bug free.