Niantic // Adding Quests to Ingress
Niantic // Ingress // Quests
Feature Director - Tech Art - Audio - VFX - UI - Animation
Highlights
Adding daily quests had a large impact in DAU (daily active users)
Adding event quests (Campaigns) allows for limited time content where a player can get unique badges for playing
Opportunities for monetization like selling bundles related to the event
Mechanisms to encourage daily play, like quest streak
Created over 300 Jira tickets for tasks that included every discipline on the team
The only project that included literally everyone on Ingress working together!
Players really loved this set of features
Fun things about the project
Building an entire quest system UI and design from scratch was challenging in a good way. The UX designer on this project was great to work with and was a great fit while we were prototyping and eventually building out the feature.
Created a pipeline of tools to increase our event quest release velocity where each tool solution depends on end user.
AppScript and Google Sheets for live events team to easily design daily, event quests
Python script that formats the CSV data into a JSON that gets checked in and reviewed by engineering.
The data is formatted in a way that it can be parsed by the Ingress server system.
Things like colors, dates, strings can be modified by this JSON script to render what we need it to in the Ingress client
Animating the reward GUI for this project was a lot of fun. To be as performant as possible for a mobile app, I chose to not use any animators or animation files. Everything done is procedurally rendered with an animated shader and tweening UI elements.
Challenges
Ingress does not typically have each person on the team working on the same feature as a unit. So this setup was wholly unique to this project which required constant coordination, and many 1:1s to make sure everyone on the team was aligned with what we were all building together.
There was a lot of logic and variation in UI graphics due to animating for multiple states
In-progress, ready to claim, claimed
Not loaded, failed to load, loaded
Animation sequence for attempting to claim but having a poor network signal
The trick was making sure all of these states transitioned between each other properly - looking out for visual edge cases.
Scope creep always comes at full speed when production and creative are not aligned - that should be resolved before anything else to continue production velocity.
I shifted leader responsibilities at the tail end of this project so that I could dedicate my full time to the next project (URP) as the only Technical Artist on Ingress.
Daily Bounties
Event Bounties
Skill Upgrades
Team Leadership+++
Game Design+++
UI Programming++
VFX++
Production Management++
Animation+
Comments