What is SparkLabs?
SparkLabs is AppLovin's in-house creative agency. While working there I was a Gameplay Developer who worked exclusively on developing 2D creatives for third-party vendors.
What Did I Do?
While at SparkLabs I worked as a Gameplay Developer using the Phaser game engine to bring design mocks to life. For each project, I had 3 to 4 days to go from mock to completion. During that time I had to complete the development of the project, go through QA with the devs to find and fix bugs, go through QA with designers to ensure the playable fit their vision, and resolve any issues brought up by the client.
I enjoyed my time at SparkLabs because of the high level of collaboration between designers and developers. I had a lot of freedom to suggest improvements and make design decisions. These improvements ranged from small visual tweaks to core gameplay changes. Because of the quick project turnaround, I was able to rapidly learn ad creative patterns and see what worked and what didn't.
I worked on a wide range of creatives from card games to tower defense to match three. Throughout all of these creatives, I was able to build out a suite of utility functions and reusable prefabs to speed up my development speed. During the first nine months I was able to deliver over 30 creatives, many of which can be seen in the attached video) at an incredibly high quality bar.
At SparkLabs the most commonly used success metric is whether a creative is a "Win", a "Big Win", or a "Fail". Many lower-level metrics go into this calculation, but I'll leave them out of it for simplicity's sake. During my first nine months, the win rate of my creatives was a full 10x the widely cited global success rate for our creatives.
Ethan's SparkLabs Work Showcase (LOUD VOLUME)