Netflix Games
Squid Game: Unleashed
Contract Game Designer
Dec 2023 - Oct 2025
Multiplayer party-royale game based on the #1 most-streamed Netflix show of all time.
Most successful Netflix Game to date, #1 in 26 countries, #1 Free Action Game in 106 countries, 20+ million downloads.
Highlights
Season 3 Play Along Event
Feature Owner/Designer on the world first Play Along live event, where watching episodes in the Netflix app unlocks corresponding content in the game. Delivered
on-time to launch the same day as the series finale Season 3. Established InfoSec
to ensure no details of the biggest Netflix series ever leaked ahead of the premier.
Content Design Owner
Owned ideation, pitches, and implementation for 200+ outfits/skins, 150+ emojis, and 75+ animated emotes, loading screen blurbs, and voiceover lines from launch through 14 seasonal content drops. Wrote and implemented character bios for all characters post-launch.
Metagame / Feature Design
Owned design and UX for live meta features such as the store, competitive ladder, and seasonal challenge pass among others. Delivered production-ready specs and UX flows on a 2 week deadline after a hard pivot in meta direction.
Season 3 Play Along Event
Designed and owned development on an objectives-based, narrative-heavy transmedia tie-in event to celebrate and promote cross-engagement with the final season of Squid Game. The goal was to hit the major narrative beats of each episode and tailor both objectives and rewards to those beats in a satisfying way.
Narrative beats were teased in a graphic novel visual approach with key characters/items obscured until the Player completed the requisite objective. Each episode was broken down into a page, with one objective per page directing the Player to the Netflix app to watch the corresponding episode.
Visual styling of Character Tokens was based on explorations of Korean cultural themes and, in keeping with the show’s theme of riffing on childhood games, Gonggi (Korean Jacks) specifically. These geometric shaped toys led us to the hexagonal shape for our tokens as the characters are treated as playthings in a twisted version of childhood.
I landed on Gonggi as the visual base for our Character Tokens long before Season 2 revealed one of the new games to be Gonggi (part of the Pentathlon episode). I was very pleased that I apparently understood the assignment!
Emotes focused on meme-able moments, taunts, and trendy/goofy dances.
Ram: “Rakshasa”
Metagame / Feature Design
Nia : “Jewel”
Front Man: “Jeoseung”
Ram Bio Entry: “Growing up driving taxis for his father, one too many traffic violations saw him out of drivng cars and into selling them. As Mumbai’s sharpest car dealer, Ram ‘Slick’ Kumar can sell any vehicle, whether it works or not. But it turns out, selling lemons can lead to a sour taste in the mouths of the wrong people. Now he needs to make lemonade fast before he ends up scrapped for parts. Ram’s playing for keeps (and a clean slate) in the Squid Game. Buckle up.”
Character bio entries intended to be brief, punchy, fun, and convey the character’s background and their motivation for joining the Squid Game.
Skins played to character backgrounds, cultural tie-ins, seasonal themes(KPOP, cyberpunk, Alice in Wonderland, etc) with a mix of badass and goofy options to cater to all player types.
Original Character Ram Kumar
Led systems design and UI/UX design on meta features, driving seasonal progression and awarding cosmetics.
Initial UI/UX mocks vs the final shipped product.
Initial UI/UX mocks vs the final shipped product
The Store is the distribution system for less time-limited cosmetics and character upgrade tokens. Players earn cash from playing and winning contests as well as progressing though the Ladder and VIP Challenge, that cash can be used to directly purchase offers in the Store or to roll the dice on pseudo-random rewards from the Mystery Box gacha mechanic.
A limited set of seasonal character skins also rotates through the Store to encourage players who’ve unlocked a large degree of content and are sitting on big bankrolls to spend their cash eash season. A free cash offer that refreshes every 8 hours encourages the Player to engage with the Store frequently.
Battle Damaged Gi-hun
Initial UI/UX mocks vs the final shipped product
Initial UI/UX mocks vs the final shipped product
Geum-ja: “Gingham Style”
Gi-hun’s Teal Tracksuit
VIP Challenges
A non-competitive, more linear progression system focused on daily engagement and incremenental progress over the skill expression of the Ladder. A general objectives based battlepass structure was chosen because it works, with the primary design challenge being how would you build a battlepass in a game with zero monetization?
The Player is served a semi-random assortment of Daily Objectives alongside a pre-scripted set of week-based objectives designed to drive engagement over multiple sessions/days. Blocks of week-based objectives were time-gated to prevent particularly motivated players from blasting through an entire month’s worth of objectives in a few days, with an extra reward for completing the entire block’s worth of objectives. Completing objectives awards progression towards a rewards track.
VIP Challenges served as the primary distribution channel for time-limited seasonal character skins other than the Front Man, with featured characters/skins rotating every month.
VIP Challenges Reward Track
Finalist Tuxedo Gi-hun
Store
Character Mastery
Dani: “Soldado”
content Design
Owned design and implementation of non-level-based content including character skins, emotes, emojis, character bios, voice over lines, loading screen tips, etc. Aimed at a young, global Millenial/Gen Z audience, delivered 200+ character skins, 150+ emojis, and 75+ animated emotes across launch and 14 seasonal cosmetics drops.
Emoji rarity scaled from common for typical “yellow” emojis up to rare for objects/simple designs and epic based on use of character faces and the rule of cool.
Gi-hun: “Mr Mom”
Show Character Seon-nyeo
The “Squid Ladder”
Thanos: “Forked”
Seon-nyeo Bio Entry: “Shaman of the Sea or charlatan? Seon-nyeo’s powers are as cryptic as her reasons for joining the Squid Game. Did a false prophecy or reckless curse earn her dangerous enemies? Arrogant and cunning, she’s an unpredictable force. Ultimately, will the Gods favor her or is Seon-nyeo’s fate already sealed?”
Emmi: “Valkyrie”
The Character Mastery feature is intended to serve as a character-specific progression mechanic by which a series of skins and ability upgrades are unlocked. Progression through the track is linear and consistent across all characters, with a new character starting in the classic teal tracksuit, unlocking character-background based outfits next, and ending with the tuxedo worn by the finalist players in the show.
In addition to providing a consistent anchor of per-character progress across the game (ex: wow, that guy has the tuxedo skin, he must be really good with Gi-hun!), progression is also intended to mirror the characters own in-world experience through Squid Game. Each character arrives at the game in the fresh teal tracksuit, as they play more games we learn more about their backstories / who they are outside of the Game, and as they become battle-hardened veterans they earn their finalist dinner tuxedo, providing a nice narrative tie-in to the themes of the show.
Direction was given for a seasonal competitive ladder system similar to Marvel SNAP, where the Player’s performance in-game drives progress towards time-limited rewards. Surviving the initial games increases the Player’s Ladder rank, while early eliminations reduces it. The Player’s current Ladder rank determines what difficulty of games they are served in the contest queue and which players they are eligible to matchmake with for skill balancing purposes.
Reaching the maximum rank on the Squid Ladder is the only way to unlock the exclusive Front Man character and his seasonal skins.
