Hatchlings
Apr 2018 - Dec 2022
As Live Operations Manager for this Des Moines, IA game studio, I told stories through social media campaigns, created and maintained documentation for all of our active games, fostered engagement in a virtual community, and took on many other unique and exciting projects.
Projects and Campaigns
Support Center Migration & Rewrite
Creating and maintaining support documentation was a big part of my role at Hatchlings. Our self-serve support center was reworked twice during my time at the company. The first time was at the end of 2019, when we moved the site from Salesforce to Zendesk. During this time, I updated all articles and created many new ones to accommodate the needs of our growing player base. This took me about two months.
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Then in 2022, Hatchlings NEXT, the latest version of our game, entered beta testing. This required a new support center to be created for the new game, and the site layout to be altered to host both versions of the documentation. This project was much more demanding than the first rework, and took me around four months.
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Below are images from the current Hatchlings support center. Click an image to view the full text. All copy and layout created by yours truly.
Nest Fest
In spring of 2019, the Internet was buzzing about the Fyre Festival documentaries that had recently been released on Netflix and Hulu. During a brainstorming meeting, our CEO mentioned that it would be funny to do a parody of Fyre Festival for an upcoming event in Easter Island, a special in-game location that opens for players during the Easter season. After throwing around a lot of ideas, we decided to run with it, naming the event Nest Fest.
As the Social Media Manager, I came up with a social media plan for the event, beginning with changing profile pictures on all Hatchlings accounts to a purple glitter square (purple glitter is a trademark of Queen Bonbon, the in-game character who rules Easter Island). Although I have no background in video editing, I also planned and created a teaser video for the event. It quickly became one of the most-viewed videos on our page. Other fun stuff we did for this event included a Glitter Dress-Up Contest, and a Glitter Queens quiz.
Nest Fest as a whole was a huge success, driving more engagement and in-game spending than any other previous Easter event.
Recipe for Romance
For February 2019, I was asked to plan a social media strategy for an in-game event in which a character, Queen Coco, was writing a romance novel and needed our players' help. To do this, I created a rough plot for a romance novel, and created polls to let our players choose the main plot points of the story. The results of these polls influenced the items and challenges available in the game. I also created other engagement-boosting activities throughout the month, like a writing contest and a Mad Libs-inspired fill-in-the-blank activity.
Glitter Queens Quiz
In Hatchlings, the rarest and hardest-to-find eggs in the game are Uber Rare eggs. During Nest Fest 2019, we introduced a special series of Uber Rare eggs called the Glitter Queens (A glitter-fied version of the Queenly series, the second Uber Rare collection ever released in the game).
To build engagement around this, I created a quiz titled, "Which Glitter Queen Are You?" I made up 10 questions with answers corresponding to each Queen in the series, and wrote out a paragraph for each result stating how the player's personality could be linked to their chosen Queen. It's one of the most fun projects I've had the privilege of doing at this job.
