Game : Illuvium (All), Dreadtides
Platform : PC
Job title : Lead game designer
At Illuvium, I led the design team in building three interconnected games, all linked through a shared economy and blockchain integration. Together, these games featured three premium currencies, hundreds of resource types, and thousands of items — all tradable between players. This created an incredibly complex and dynamic economy, where player actions directly influenced supply and demand. Designing for this level of player control required a system that was both flexible and deeply robust.
With my background in economics, I helped architect the broader Illuvium ecosystem — not just inside the games, but across the DAO and token-based infrastructure. Because the project was tied to an ERC-20 token and governed by a decentralized community, in-game economies had to integrate seamlessly with real-world market dynamics. Every gameplay decision had economic weight, and ensuring long-term sustainability across all systems was a core part of my role.
I also designed the economy for Dreadtides, a PC-based 4X strategy tower defense game where player expansion and tech progression directly affected game difficulty. There, I built a reactive economic system that encouraged strategic specialization, punished overextension, and adapted to each player’s evolving strategy. The focus was on replayability, emergent decision-making, and maintaining constant tension between growth and survival — applying the same economic principles of scarcity, tradeoffs, and long-term progression in a very different genre.
You can read about the 4 titles in more detail below.
Economy Design
Illuvium: Zero
As the economy designer for Illuvium: Zero, my goal was to create a sustainable, player-driven system that integrates meaningfully with the broader Illuvium universe — while remaining engaging and rewarding as a standalone experience.
Illuvium: Zero is a mobile and desktop city-building simulator where players develop NFT land, extract valuable resources, and make strategic decisions that directly impact the wider Illuvium economy. It’s designed to act as the economic engine behind Illuvium: Overworld and Arena, rewarding long-term thinking and resource management.
Here’s an overview of the economic design decisions that underpin Illuvium: Zero.
1. A Strategic, Supply-Side Core Loop
At its core, Zero is about strategic resource generation:
Players construct and upgrade facilities on their land.
These buildings produce Fuel, Elements, and Energy over time.
Players optimize layouts, manage capacity, and plan upgrades based on their land’s unique traits.
Unlike traditional city-builders, every resource generated has real utility across the Illuvium ecosystem. In particular, Fuel serves as the primary output of economic value, which can be exported for use in Overworld or traded on-chain.
The design encourages players to think like operators — not just city architects. Every decision, from what to build to when to harvest, has short- and long-term tradeoffs.
2. Land Ownership with Real Utility
Each land plot is a procedurally generated NFT with its own set of economic attributes:
Tier (1–5): Higher-tier land offers more build slots, faster output, and higher resource capacity.
Resource Spread: The land’s layout determines its fuel types, elemental resources, and blueprint discovery potential.
Blueprint Potential: Players can scan Illuvials (captured in Overworld) on their land to unlock cosmetic blueprints.
I intentionally designed land to have layered utility:
It acts as a passive generator (via Fuel),
A speculative asset (via blueprints),
And a strategic challenge (via build-space limitations and efficiency optimization).
This gives landholders multiple paths to value creation and differentiates the experience across land types and tiers.
3. Fuel as Economic Backbone
Fuel is the main economic output of Illuvium: Zero, and it’s central to how the game connects with the larger ecosystem. There are three Fuel types:
Crypton – used for travel in Overworld
Hyperion – used for Illuvial captures
Solon – used in crafting
Fuel is tokenized, meaning it can be:
Transferred to Overworld to power gameplay actions
Sold on the marketplace for revenue
Strategically stockpiled based on supply and demand dynamics
I designed the Fuel economy to follow a supply-side model, where players in Zero produce a resource that is in demand across multiple titles. This aligns incentives between landowners and gameplay-focused players, while supporting an interconnected, player-owned economy.
4. Active vs. Passive Play
Illuvium: Zero supports both active and passive engagement — but rewards deeper planning:
Passive play yields consistent resources over time.
Active play (layout optimization, timely harvesting, upgrades) significantly increases efficiency.
Time and Energy management become key differentiators for top-performing players.
This layered engagement model was important to me: it ensures casual players can contribute to the economy, while giving more invested players meaningful control over their output and progression.
5. Cosmetic Blueprints: A Creative Economy Layer
Beyond Fuel, players can scan captured Illuvials on their land to unlock blueprints — unique, cosmetic skins usable in other Illuvium games.
Key blueprint economy considerations:
Blueprints are tradable NFTs with speculative and collector value.
Rarity is dynamic, based on scanning frequency, land type, and Illuvial variety.
They add a creative and prestige-driven layer to the game economy.
This system introduces a side economy that’s entirely cosmetic, ensuring no pay-to-win elements, while still creating meaningful value for landholders and collectors alike.
6. Free-to-Play Onboarding, Premium Output
To balance accessibility with ownership value, I helped shape a dual-access model:
Free players can build and experiment on test-tier land, but cannot export or tokenize resources.
Landowners control all real economic output: Fuel and blueprint generation.
This model serves two key goals:
Lowering the onboarding barrier for new players
Preserving the scarcity and value of land-based production
It also establishes Illuvium: Zero as a gateway experience — allowing players to test the systems before committing economically.
7. Interconnected, Sustainable Design
Most importantly, I designed Illuvium: Zero to be economically sustainable and interconnected with the rest of the Illuvium universe:
Fuel demand is player-driven, scaling with activity in Overworld and Arena.
Blueprints tie directly to collectible gameplay, encouraging cross-title engagement.
DAO governance allows the community to respond to market conditions by adjusting output rates, rewards, and balancing factors.
The economy is built for long-term viability — not short-term speculation. The design prioritizes player ownership, strategic depth, and inter-game utility.
Designing the economy for Illuvium: Zero meant bridging traditional city-builder mechanics with the emerging possibilities of Web3. It’s a game where every structure, every resource, and every decision contributes to a larger, interconnected world.
My focus was on creating an economy that’s:
Intuitive for new players
Rewarding for strategic thinkers
Balanced for long-term health
Fully integrated with the Illuvium ecosystem
I’m proud of how Zero expands the concept of what a city-builder can be — not just a simulation, but a real part of a functional, player-owned economy.
Economy Design
illuvium:
Overworld
As designer for Illuvium: Overworld, my role was to architect a system that blended engaging gameplay loops with real, sustainable economic value. The game sits at the intersection of open-world exploration, creature collection, and DeFi — which presented a unique challenge: how do we design an economy that rewards skill and strategy, supports asset scarcity, and scales over time?
This post outlines the key economic systems I designed in Overworld, and how they tie together to form a closed-loop, player-driven, play-to-own ecosystem.
1. Core Loop and Economic Drivers
The foundation of Illuvium: Overworld is a classic but carefully refined gameplay loop: explore, gather, battle — with each loop costing Fuel, the game’s premium currency.
Players can choose from a free-to-play experience or three escalating tiers of paid travel. Higher-tier travel increases the average rarity of rewards, but also raises the gameplay difficulty. This creates a strong risk-reward structure, where players are always encouraged to improve their power level to take on harder zones and reap greater rewards.
Core Gameplay Flow:
Explore the Overworld: Players traverse alien biomes to discover resources and encounter wild Illuvials.
Harvest Resources: Players collect materials like shards, ore, and gems essential for capturing Illuvials and crafting.
Battle and Capture: Players are limited to a finite number of encounters, making each decision meaningful. Captures cost resources, and players must assess risk vs. reward in every moment.
This loop introduces core economic dynamics: resource scarcity, player agency, and strategic choice. Each gameplay session becomes a series of economic decisions — what to spend, what to keep, and what to chase.
2. Resource-Based Economy
The economy of Overworld is built on multiple interconnected resources, each with a defined purpose and value:
Fuel: The premium blockchain-based currency, required for travel, crafting, and minting NFTs.
Shards: Used to capture Illuvials; different tiers provide varying capture probabilities.
Crafting Materials: Ores and gems used to upgrade gear and increase efficiency in both PvE and PvP gameplay.
Illuvials: Playable NFT characters used in battle; the primary source of economic value and demand in the ecosystem.
Each Overworld session uses Energy, a limited resource that controls how many actions a player can take. This restriction adds a layer of strategic scarcity. Players can't do everything — instead, every encounter becomes a gamble, similar to pulling a slot machine. Do you go after that rare resource node? Chase a high-tier Illuvial? Each choice carries both gameplay and economic consequences.
Every element of the game — from exploration to combat to crafting — feeds back into this closed-loop economy, where Fuel consumption drives gameplay and NFT creation (Illuvials and gear) provides potential real-world value.
3. Illuvial Scarcity and Utility
Creating meaningful scarcity was a central pillar of my design. Each Illuvial is a unique, playable NFT — but we needed more than uniqueness; we needed an evolving, deflationary model that adapts to player behavior.
Here’s how I approached that:
Seasonal Bonding Curve Capture
Illuvials are released in seasonal batches. Each Illuvial type has a dynamic bonding curve — the more it is captured, the harder (and more expensive) it becomes to catch.
This curve generates natural scarcity, driven directly by player activity. Popular Illuvials become harder to get, adding market pressure and increasing their perceived value.
Once a season ends, those Illuvials become extinct — no longer capturable in the world — increasing the value of the existing supply.
This approach drives player urgency (FOMO) while ensuring long-term value for early collectors and active players.
Deflation Through Evolution
Players can evolve Illuvials by fusing three of the same type.
This process can be repeated up to two times, meaning the most powerful versions require a total of 9 base Illuvials to create.
Fusion reduces the circulating supply of lower-tier Illuvials while increasing the value of evolved ones.
Together, these systems form a deflationary loop: capture → fuse → evolve → remove from supply. Scarcity increases naturally over time, and players directly influence it.
4. Free-to-Play Access and Onboarding
We designed Overworld with a freemium funnel — ensuring accessibility without compromising economic integrity.
Free players can explore basic zones and interact with common Illuvials using starter gear.
Premium players can pay Fuel to access higher-tier biomes, better rewards, and rarer captures.
This model widens the player base while preserving economic value for those who invest. Free players help drive ecosystem activity and long-term engagement, while premium players contribute to the marketplace and token economy.
5. Uniqueness and Variability in Illuvials
To make Illuvials more than just cosmetic NFTs, I designed a stat roll system that introduces massive variability — and therefore, potential value — in every capture.
Each Illuvial has:
6 core stats (e.g. speed, health, damage, resistance)
6 potential roll outcomes per stat
That creates a total of 46,656 unique stat combinations per Illuvial, making every capture a potential jackpot.
A perfectly rolled Illuvial can be orders of magnitude more valuable than a poorly rolled one, even if they are the same species. This adds an additional thrill to the capture process — and ensures that even within the same season and species, scarcity and value vary dynamically.
This mechanic supports both trading speculation and gameplay utility, giving players multiple reasons to chase and hold high-tier assets.
Economy Design
illuvium: Arena
In Illuvium: Arena, the economy focus was on building the demand side of the Illuvium ecosystem — ensuring that everything players earned or produced in Overworld or Zero had real utility, competitive significance, and emotional value.
While Zero served as the production layer and Overworld as the collection layer, Arena was the battleground where players used their Illuvials, gear, and knowledge to compete, climb ranks, and earn prestige. The result was a game mode that incentivized progression, created long-term demand for powerful assets, and delivered high-stakes tactical gameplay with real economic implications.
1. Arena as the Demand Engine
At its core, Illuvium: Arena is a high-skill, auto-battler PvP game where players assemble teams of Illuvials and pit them against one another in ranked competition.
The core design principle was simple: the better your assets, the higher your ceiling — but skill remained a critical factor.
Stronger Illuvials (acquired through Overworld) provide more powerful team compositions.
Optimized gear (crafted with materials from Zero and Overworld) offers combat advantages.
Synergistic combinations reward strategic depth and theory crafting.
This structure created a natural demand loop: players wanted stronger Illuvials and better gear not just for collection — but to win. This tied Arena performance directly to the rest of the Illuvium economy, making every progression choice meaningful.
2. Power, Performance, and Prestige
The Arena economy wasn’t just about stats — it was about status.
In designing the system, we ensured that Illuvials had tangible combat performance differences based on:
Evolution level (base → stage 3)
Roll quality (stat variability from capture)
Synergies (affinities and classes)
This meant that a well-rolled, fully-evolved Illuvial could make or break a match — especially at high ranks. Players were incentivized to:
Capture repeatedly in Overworld to find meta-relevant or high-roll units
Fuse multiple copies to evolve their strongest units
Experiment with different teams and builds to counter the meta
Over time, this created a thriving demand cycle:
More competitive players → greater need for optimal Illuvials
More experimentation → increased appetite for diverse unit collections
Higher stakes → stronger incentive to invest in gear and upgrades
By tying gameplay success directly to asset quality, we positioned Arena as a prestige layer — where competitive players showcased the value of what they’d earned or acquired.
3. The Role of Gear and Loadouts
Alongside Illuvials, gear played a critical economic role.
Gear is crafted using materials sourced in Overworld, processed in Zero, and then equipped in Arena. The gear system introduces another layer of demand for:
Specific crafting materials
Fuel (to process and mint gear)
High-stat gear with optimized modifiers
Each piece of gear has:
Core stats (power, resistance, speed, etc.)
Roll variance, similar to Illuvials
Synergy bonuses when paired with certain team compositions
As with Illuvials, better gear didn’t guarantee victory — but it gave players more tools to execute their strategies and respond to meta changes.
This made crafting and optimizing gear another form of long-term investment and ensured that Arena could drive demand not only for creatures, but for resources across the Illuvium ecosystem.
4. Infinite Skill Ceiling, Economic Reward
While asset strength mattered, Arena had multiple game modes. Illuvium Ranked was never pay-to-win and Illuvium Leviathan allowed the most powerful units to reign supreme. My design focus was to create a system where:
Asset strength increases your strategic options
Skill determines how well you execute under constraints
Every match provides feedback and learning
This approach created a competitive loop where:
Entry-level players could compete with common Illuvials
High-level players chased optimal teams and gear to climb leaderboards
Top performers could showcase (and monetize) their builds in tournaments or DAO-backed events
In doing so, Arena became a powerful economic sink and aspirational driver. Every player wanted to improve — and every improvement looped back into Overworld and Zero.
5. Meta Evolution and Economic Flexibility
One of the long-term goals was to ensure that Arena could remain dynamic and replayable. To support this, we built systems that encouraged constant meta evolution:
Balancing patches and seasonal refreshes introduced shifts in unit value
New Illuvial seasons brought fresh team-building strategies
Synergy mechanics rewarded creative experimentation
Economically, this meant:
Demand for different Illuvials shifted over time
Previously “undervalued” units could suddenly become high-priority
Crafting materials and gear with specific bonuses became hot commodities based on meta trends
This constant flux kept players engaged and ensured a non-static demand layer, increasing both retention and market activity across the Illuvium suite.
economy design
in dreadtides
Dreadtides is a PC-based hybrid of 4X strategy and tower defence — a game where you expand, exploit, and defend against relentless waves of enemies in an ever-escalating battle for survival. As the economy designer, my role was to develop the systems that pushed players to make meaningful strategic choices, adapt to emergent threats, and specialize in ways that made every session feel unique.
At its heart, Dreadtides is a game of controlled overwhelm. Players must grow, research, and fortify — but do so within an economy that scales enemy difficulty based not only on time, but on the player’s own success. Every expansion comes at a cost. Every resource you exploit increases your vulnerability. And every specialization locks you out of other possibilities.
1. Scaling Pressure Through Adaptive Difficulty
A core challenge in designing Dreadtides was creating an economy and progression model that made each playthrough increasingly intense, while remaining fair and strategically rich.
We approached this through a dual-scaling difficulty system:
Time-Based Scaling: Enemy waves grow stronger, faster, and more complex as time progresses — regardless of player action.
Player-Driven Scaling: The game also monitors player progression — including territory claimed, resources harvested, and tech unlocked — and dynamically increases the challenge in response.
This system punishes unchecked growth. The stronger you become, the more formidable the next wave becomes. The design intent was to discourage mindless expansion and instead reward careful, specialized growth.
In practice, this created a constant tension between:
Expansion (to gather resources and unlock tech),
And defense (to survive the increasingly aggressive threats you’re triggering).
This tension became the backbone of the game’s engagement loop — keeping players on edge and forcing tough economic decisions at every stage.
2. Resource Economy and Strategic Specialization
The economic model of Dreadtides revolves around three primary axes:
Resource Scarcity
Territorial Risk
Tech-Driven Build Diversity
Players begin with access to limited local resources, but to survive long-term, they must expand into riskier territory to gather exotic or advanced materials. These materials feed into different research paths, each unlocking distinct build styles and defensive strategies.
The system is intentionally non-linear. There is no single “optimal” tech tree. Instead, players are pushed to react to the world they’re given:
Found a biome rich in plasma vents? You might focus on energy weapons and shield tech.
Surrounded by volatile materials? You could lean into explosive ordinance and high-risk, high-reward builds.
Running lean on advanced resources? You'll need to invest in more efficient structures and research economic multipliers.
This resource-to-tech dynamic drives player identity in every run — no two bases, tech trees, or defenses play the same way. It also creates meaningful replayability, as each map layout and resource distribution encourages a new path.
The economic system was designed to:
Force specialization over generalization
Ensure opportunity cost in every upgrade and expansion
Encourage reactive strategy, not preset builds
Ultimately, if a player tries to "do it all," the scaling system ensures they are overwhelmed. Specialization is survival.
3. Defensive Economy and Tradeoffs
As a tower defense game, Dreadtides required a tight integration between economy and survival mechanics. Defensive structures had to be:
Costly enough to prevent spam,
Powerful enough to matter,
And diverse enough to create strategic variation.
To support this, we implemented a multi-resource construction economy, where higher-tier towers required not just more resources, but more types of resources. This limited how quickly players could scale powerful defenses and created economic choke points that had to be solved through expansion, trade routes, or tech unlocks.
Players had to ask:
Do I invest in basic turrets now, or tech up to plasma towers later?
Can I afford to push into that high-risk zone for rare resources?
Is it better to optimize one choke point or spread thin across multiple fronts?
These questions, and the decisions they triggered, became the foundation of the game’s mid-to-late game economy.
4. Driving Retention Through Emergent Strategy
One of the main goals of the economy design was to increase retention by ensuring players were forced to adapt.
Every map, every tech path, and every expansion decision resulted in different resource access and enemy behavior. Because player progression influenced difficulty, players couldn't rely on one static build — instead, they had to iterate, specialize, and sometimes fail before finding the optimal strategy for that run.
Key retention-focused design principles:
Emergent complexity: Systems interact in ways that are discoverable but not always predictable.
Non-reversible commitments: Choices in tech and build path matter, encouraging replay to explore alternatives.
Run-based identity: Each game feels like a story built from the player’s decisions and circumstances.
By tying economic decisions directly to survival outcomes — and dynamically scaling the threat — we created a system that was punishing, but fair, and deeply replayable.
Closing Thoughts
Designing the economy for Dreadtides required balancing freedom and consequence, expansion and risk, and specialization and scarcity.
My key contributions included:
Designing the adaptive scaling system that ties player progression directly to difficulty
Building a resource economy that drives specialization and strategic variety
Structuring tech trees and build paths around resource-driven constraints
Creating economic pressure that fuels tension, challenge, and replayability
The result is a system where every decision has weight — and where no two games play the same. Dreadtides doesn’t just test your defenses; it tests your ability to build an economy strong enough to survive the storm.
