Merge Mansion — Renovation Progression

Renovation Progression was a gameplay-led UA concept I created and owned end to end. The starting point was a player motivation we hadn’t built around directly: the satisfaction of restoring spaces, communicated through hyper-condensed visible progress. I wrote the brief, designed the script structure, directed the external production, and led the variant testing system that came out of it.

The strategic question was timing. Gameplay arriving too late risked losing intent; gameplay arriving too early broke the emotional setup that gave the renovation fantasy its appeal.

The structure I locked in opens with a clear renovation problem, shows merge gameplay as the cause of visible progress, pays off with a satisfying before-and-after transformation, and closes with the broader mansion fantasy and a CTA. The principle behind it: gameplay isn’t an interruption to the story, it’s the cause of the story.

I designed a systematic variant ladder across the project, each variant built to answer a specific question rather than to generate volume. Earlier gameplay placement, mid-gameplay inserts, reward-led hooks (chest, pet, progression goal), and simulated-gameplay overlays. Some variants succeeded, several didn’t, and the ones that didn’t were as useful as the ones that did. Rushed gameplay broke immersion. Trend-style caption overlays cheapened the fantasy and underperformed the control. Reward-led hooks didn’t outperform the original.

Two outputs from this project carried forward beyond the campaign itself. The first was the progression messaging approach, which became one of our team’s established UA paths. The second was the principle that player agency should be tied to story — the player isn’t just watching transformation happen, they’re the reason it’s happening.