CASE STUDY / 02
COMPANY
Rovio Entertainment
PRODUCT
Angry Birds Dream Blast
ROLE
Senior UX Designer
TEAM
Product Manager · Game Designers · Developers · LiveOps stakeholders
RESPONSABILITIES
UX Strategy · Live Ops Feature Design · Player Experience · Prototyping · Cross-functional Collaboration
01 / OVERVIEW
River Rush started as a race mechanic. The opportunity was to turn it into an experience.
River Rush was a new limited-time LiveOps event built around a competitive race. Rather than jumping straight into mechanics, I introduced a discovery phase to understand what could make the experience compelling beyond progression alone.
That work gave the team a shared foundation for designing the event: competition to create tension, meaningful choices to build agency, and moments of payoff that made progress feel rewarding.
02 / DISCOVERY
Starting with motivation, not mechanics
Before defining the event mechanics, I introduced a discovery phase with Product, Game Design and other stakeholders to align on the player experience we wanted to create.
Together, we explored motivations, existing behaviours, emotional goals, assumptions and success criteria. This shifted the conversation from “What feature should we build?” to “What experience do we want players to have?”
DESIGNING THE “DON’T LET IT CATCH ME” MOMENT
03 / DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Turning player needs into design principles
01
Start with player motivation
Align the team around what makes players care before defining mechanics.
02
Create emotional peaks
Use rewards, celebration and character moments to make progress memorable.
03
Design together, earlier
Bring UX, Product and Game Design together before solutions are defined.
THE KEY INSIGHT
The discovery work changed how we evaluated ideas. Instead of asking only whether a mechanic supported progression, we also asked what tension, choice or payoff it created for the player.
04 / SOLUTION
Turning progression into a sequence of tension, choice and payoff.
PLAYER AGENCY
Choose what makes the win worth chasing
REWARD & DELIGHT
Make winning feel worth it
CHALLENGE
ANTICIPATION
ACHIEVEMENT
CHOICE
REWARD
Progression needed to feel like more than a sequence of rewards. We used character reactions, playful animation and moments of surprise to give key milestones personality and emotional payoff.
The intent was simple: make winning feel good — and occasionally make players smile.
COMPETITIVE DRIVE — "I want to reach the finish line first"
EMOTIONAL PAYOFF — "I want winning to feel special"
PLAYER AGENCY — "I want to choose what I’m competing for."
05 / IMPACT
TOP 2
LIVEOPS EVENT
Ranked among the strongest events for player engagement and retention.
The project demonstrated the value of involving UX before mechanics were defined.
06 / REFLECTION
Design influence starts before the first screen is created.
River Rush reinforced something I now carry into every project: UX creates the most leverage before solutions become expensive.
The biggest contribution wasn’t a single interaction or screen. It was creating enough shared understanding for Product, Game Design and UX to make better decisions together. By bringing discovery and alignment into the definition phase, UX helped shape not only how the event worked, but what was worth building in the first place.
NEXT PROJECT
Uncovering the player value behind account creation and conversion.
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