SciPlay
Jackpot PArty Casino
Senior Game Designer
Oct 2022 - Aug 2023
Game Designer
Jan 2013 - Aug 2015
#1 Slots game on Mobile and #7 Top Grossing Mobile Game in North America as of Oct 2025.
SciPlay’s first social/mobile game, catapulting the company from a small developer of niche slots-based retail box games into one of the world’s leading mobile game developers and an eventual IPO (then being re-acquired by the old parent company, but we’ll ignore that for the sake of the story).
Highlights
Diamond Pass
Built the business case, pitched, designed and served as product owner through development for a rebuild of Jackpot Party Casino’s dysfunctional battlepass system. The original “Honey Pass” powered by the “Honey Do List” / “Extra Credit” objective systems failed to drive significant revenue for over a year.
I assembled the business case of the revenue/engagement that a battlepass should drive on a game the size of Jackpot Party, how much revenue was being left on the table, why the current “Honey Pass” wasn’t performing, and how to fix it to the executive leadership team.
This resulted in taking product ownership of both feature development teams on Jackpot Party for ~6 months to rebuild these core systems into a modern, holistic battlepass/objectives system. The Diamond Pass was delivered on time, drove a sustained 10% revenue increase over its first full season. The difference was so stark that the “Honey Pass” / “Honey Do List” was deprecated for all players only 2 weeks into the tech test.
Diamond Pass
The “Honey Pass” launched in Jackpot Party Casino in Sept of 2020 and from the get go failed to drive the sustained engagement and revenue improvements that are characteristic of the battlepass mechanic. For over a year it hung around without iteration or much attention from game/product leadership, which seemed kinda crazy to me as the competitive intelligence pointman for SciPlay who’d spent years highlighting the impacts of various battlepasses in the casino space within the company. In late 2021 I began assembling a business case to quantify how much revenue the game that accounts for 50% of company revenue was leaving on the table to convince the executive leadership team to prioritize another go. This case, accompanied by in-depth design analysis and competitive comps, were presented to the ELT in Jan of 2022. A handful of egregious issues were fast tracked for fixing as a result but didn’t address the systemic issues of the “Honey Pass”, and didn’t make meaningful improvements from the business side.
This lack of results led to officially joining the team in Oct of 2022 to spearhead addressing the “Honey Pass” issue.
TL;DR Results:
10% increase in sustained revenue over the Diamond Pass first season run on a 13 year old, $360 million a year game in the challenging post-COVID, post-IDFA mobile business environment.
Significant, sustained increase in engagement from Pass purchasers
Positive reception from VIP focus calls, appreciation for extra challenge and additional rewards/content
“Honey Pass” / “Honey Do List” / “Extra Credit” deprecated for all players just 2 weeks into the Diamond Pass tech test.
Why the Diamond Pass?
Daily objectives were updated to higher difficulty, cohort segmented requirements to allow for more targeted engagement drivers. Game leadership expressed concern about losing the “infinite tasks” functionality of the “Extra Credit” feature. This feedback was incorporated via the “premium challenge”, a bonus daily objective that is unlocked via purchasing the “Diamond Pass”. This encourages purchasing the Pass to allow for faster progress, but also purchasing as early as possible in the Pass season to maximize the value of the bonus objective. This objective only gives pass progression once per day, but a small coin reward can be claimed as many times as the Player completes the objective.
It remains very possible for the Player to complete the entire Pass without these bonus premium objectives, any excess progression from Pass holding players feeds into the Prestige Chest.
The “Honey Do List” was a daily appointment feature with series of simple, easy to complete objectives that were not segmented by player, a VIP with 5 figure monthly spend gets the same objectives as a day 1 new player. This approach was outdated in 2020, as most of the industry, including every other publisher in the top 30 grossing mobile slots titles, had moved to dynamic objectives systems that tailor objective types and difficulty to different player segments.
Aesthetically, the “chore list” theme did not match up with the high energy, ritzy glamour of a Vegas-style party. I’ve never gone to a party and been handed a chore list. If I did, I’d probably leave.
The “Extra Credit” mechanic was originally implemented as an fix to the ease of the “Honey Do List”, unlocking when the “Honey Do List” was completed and offering the Player an infinitely refreshing series of easy to complete objectives. This led to infinite, unchecked progress towards the “Honey Pass” and certain players completing the entire Pass within days and needed to be reigned in.
The Season tab of the “Diamond Pass” also displays a section of expiring season objectives explicitly targeting actively-running live ops events. These time-limited season objectives bridge the motivation gap between daily objectives and month long season objectives with a duration of 3-4 days to match the live ops schedule. Being able to layer additional objectives and rewards on top of live ops events supercharges both the Pass and the live ops team, providing as holistic of a cross game integration as possible.
Example: the Jackpot Bingo promotion is running for 4 days, where completing a bingo card earns a spin on a prize wheel featuring a Jackpot space with a major coin reward. A featured season objective might prompt the Player to land the Jackpot space, or to spin the prize wheel 5 times.
The “Honey Do List” daily objectives system didn’t push players to increase their engagement. All objectives could be completed within 3 slot machine spins (~10 seconds) in some conditions
The “Extra Credit” objectives unlocked when the “Honey Do List” was completed gave unlimited progress towards the “Honey Pass”, allowing VIP’s and heavily engaged spenders to complete a month’s worth of pass in a few days.
There was no visual tie between the “Honey Do List” and the “Honey Pass”, none of the daily objectives show that completing this objective drives progress towards the Pass, and the Pass lived in an entirely separate UI that was inaccessible from the List. All Pass progress happened in the background.
The product/econ team misinterpreted battlepasses as extended length sales, frontloading the value into the initial purchase unlocking the “Honey Pass”. Battlepasses work when player rewards/value are biased toward the end of the rewards track, requiring consistent engagement on the part of the Player to unlock those rewards.
The “Honey Pass” didn’t award any kind of exclusive, time limited rewards, effectively being mostly a coin sale where the majority of rewards came from the initial purchase of the Pass itself, leading players to view it as a passive bonus instead of a primary driver of engagement as a battlepass should function.
It was never meaningfully integrated into the other systems, living in a separate UI with all progress happening in the background out of the Player’s eye and requiring awkward back and forth menu juggling to monitor, again reinforcing the player perception as a passive, background thing.
There is also no grand reward for completing the Pass, it just ends on a rather disappointing, low value reward. There’s a lack of of a “prestige mechanic”, a la Call of Duty, that may encourage the Player to continue engaging with the Pass/objectives system after finishing the rewards track by awarding a generic prize for every ‘X’ excess pass points earned.
The Diamond Pass
I replaced the disjointed core systems with a single, easy to navigate UI that incorporates the Pass rewards track, daily objectives, and longer term seasonal objectives into one tabbed screen. Thematically, I pushed for a glitzy, Vegas VIP-type of experience to make the Pass feel like an exclusive club you want to be in, which led to the diamond/art deco aesthetic.
Pass rewards were shifted to being concentrated in the back half of the rewards track, with access to an exclusive never before seen slot machine replacing the immediate large coin reward for purchasing the Pass. This replaces a major currency source with a non-currency reward that is also a currency sink, a 2 for 1 economy boost. A Prestige Chest mechanic was added to the end of the rewards track that serves as a sink for excess pass progress once the rewards track has been completed, ensuring the Pass system remains relevant for highly engaged players post completion.
Season objectives have higher difficulty requirements designed to take the Player multiple sessions to complete, providing a medium to long term motivation drive to the Pass system. These provide substantially more progression, but are also time-gated, with a new “block” of season objectives unlocking each week. Combined with the hard cap to daily Pass progress, this prevents players from completing the Pass too quickly, with the earliest possible completion time being 22 days in a 30 day season. It also encourages players to check back often to see what new objectives have been unlocked.
The hook of “premium challenges” are reused here, providing Pass holders with an extra objective per weekly block release to claim. Claim being the important term, all players can make progress towards and complete “premium challenges” but attempting to claim a completed “premium” challenge as a free player prompts them to purchase the Pass. This serves as another point to surface the Pass purchase option and why it really pays to be a Pass member.
The moment of purchase is incredibly important to me as a F2P designer focused on player experience, and I made sure to build bespoke offer dialogs clearly communicating the Pass perks and a post purchase dialog celebrating unlocking the premium Pass, which is the only custom post-purchase dialog in the game. The Honey character that served as the mascot of the deprecated “Honey Pass” has been updated with a glitzy getup and featured here to pay homage to the previous Pass feature.