Product Marketing Manager
Graphic Designer
My Roles:
1 Art Lead + 1 Dev Lead
3 Full Stack Developers
1 UX Designer
2 Artists / Animators
1 Script Writer / Editor
Teammates:
Duration:
8 months
“Order for Liv! ” You pick up your iced coffee from the bar and thank the Grim Reaper for –
Wait a minute. That’s not the Grim Reaper. No, that was Grim – his charming apprentice in a pink hoodie. And guess what? You’re also dead.
Grim is an 8-bit, drink-mixing, cozy game where the player steps into the shoes of Liv: a girl who died at the age of 22, unable to move on to the afterlife because she has been struggling to resolve her regrets from when she was alive.
It’s been rumored among the lost souls that the Grim Reaper runs a bar where he can create potions that provide instant peace with his special recipes, allowing souls to move on as they please.
Traversing far and wide, Liv arrives at his bar and discovers that the Grim Reaper has been replaced by his apprentice, Grim, who offers to assist her by listening to her life story and crafting a potion to erase her painful memories.
Ultimately, Liv decides to embrace the authenticity of her regrets and chooses not to take the potion, finding peace with her past as well as the ability to move on.
Part I: All for the ‘gram
This was the first major collaborative project I’ve worked on, and during my role as the Marketing Manager I was solely responsible for digital marketing, brand management, user insight analysis, and acquiring & maintaining new audiences & engagement.
We had team meetings twice a week (one with the entire team and another for one-on-ones with our department lead), and I closely collaborated with our Art Lead to brainstorm Instagram post ideas and strategies every week. We used past analytics from the last Marketing Manager to determine the best times to post to maximize our engagement, which were as follows:
Monday
12:00 PM, 3:00 PM, 6:00 PM
11:00 AM, 12:00 PM
Wednesday
Saturday
3:00 PM, 6:00 PM
Because I had to post two to three times per week, I came up with 12 different types of post categories. I wanted to highlight different aspects of the game from the actual gameplay, to our team socials, and even behind-the-scenes footage from my teammates, which made for repurposable yet unique content every time.
By the end of the school year, I had increased our Instagram follower count by almost 2x, reach by 1,600%, and engagement by 7,500% organically consistently posting with thoughtful captions as well as engaging with our audience and other cozy, indie game developer accounts.
Instagram Sample: Captured straight from the ‘gram! A lot of thought went into planning the feed, from formulating a cohesive color palette, to ideating repurposable content, to designing the graphics for posting, and gathering bits of art and dev work from my teammates.
Part II: Dabbling in UI Design
In our final quarter working together as a team, I was tasked by our Art Lead to create a selection of templates for our social media on Figma rather than just Canva & Photoshop where I usually created our posts.
I was excited to dip into this task because I had always wanted to learn how to use Figma but had no idea where or how to start – our Art Lead kindly gave me a tutorial on the fundamentals of Figma, and then allowed me to take creative charge as I spent the next 5 weeks prototyping. With this task, I was able to practice with low risk because these prototypes were for social media assets, which are always changeable compared to if I were to be designing assets for the in-game UI. I started from about 30+ low-fidelity wireframes, moving onto mid-fidelity, and repeated each week until I finally ended up with 10 complete, high-fidelity mockups.
This was such a memorable project to be a part of, and I couldn’t have asked for a better group of peers to work with. Being on the marketing side, I was able to collaborate with each person on the team and see each facet of the game’s development up-close as I documented everyone’s hard work and was able to showcase it on our Instagram, journal-style. Finally, with my UI / UX task in the end I was really able to cement my interest in that aspect of product and design in tech, and so thus did my journey begin. :)
Previously: