Aura Farm
Experience — Roblox
Visits
12+M
Team
10
Role
Game Director
Pets/Abilities Designed
50+
The Directive
Players open boxes to collect magical pets, and every pet grants an ability used to steal from other players — or to stop them. Built from four creators' concept. I directed it and designed the roster.
Game Loop
1.Grab a Box and bring it to your base
2.Open Box
3.Unlock a Pet with an Ability (pet makes $/sec)
4.Use ability to defend your base or steal from others
Concepting
Someone else's idea, made buildable
The four creator partners brought the premise and an audience already waiting for it. My job was turning that into something that survives contact with players — faithful to what they pitched, and structured enough to balance.
Most of that work landed in the roster: 50+ pets, each one granting an ability, each one a balance decision.
Every pet went through a weekly call with the partners — each one got a yes or a no. It kept the roster true to what they'd pitched, and it meant nothing got built for weeks before somebody said it wasn't right. A fast no is worth more than a slow maybe.
ECONOMY
Value In, Value Out
Each item has a $/sec value set by size, rarity and mutation. Those numbers get big fast, so I scaled the rest of the economy — prices, upgrades, payouts — to sit in the same range.
Shovels carry durability on top of that: a high-luck shovel is worth a fixed number of digs, and when they're gone the good pulls stop until you buy another. That's the sink that keeps income from piling up.
Rarity
Pure Random Punishes The Player
Problem
Getting the pet you actually wanted often meant rolling the same box over and over. Pure random doesn't care that you've tried a hundred times — and the player who has is exactly the one about to quit.
Solution
A pity system. Keep rolling the same box and the odds quietly tilt toward the rarest thing you haven't hit, then reset once you land it.
LIVE-OPS
Showrunning It Live
I designed the Admins and the sequences they ran, and wrote the scripts for the shows.
Then I ran them — live, alongside the creators while they streamed, pushing the show section to section, down to the minute.
A live show only holds together if somebody is steering it in the moment.
Our animator made this from the concept we scripted
Monetization
Bring the shop into the world
I designed the monetization and tuned it constantly:
Lucky blocks feed the chase, cosmetics buy standing. Two spends, two reasons.
And I put the shop in the world rather than behind a menu. You see the item on your avatar. That's a stronger pull than only behind a menu
Lessons & Learns
What Aura Farm Taught Me
Right idea, wrong packaging
Rolling for a creature you love and fighting other players with it is a strong loop on its own. We wrapped it in stealing because stealing was the trend that year, and the wrapper worked against the thing inside it — theft makes the best moment in your game something that happens to somebody. I'd build this roster around roll-and-fight, and take a theft loop again only with the guardrails designed in from the start.
Virality delivers the install and nothing after it. The eight-year-old who logs in every day is who decides whether a game gets a second month, and a feature that's incredible in a fifteen-second video isn't automatically fun the hundredth time somebody does it.
We could see parts of this weren't working and we moved too slowly on them. Directing inside someone else's premise made me cautious about changing it — drastic changes were needed... and needed to happen sooner.
The Clip Travels, The Player Stays
Pivot sooner, and harder