The problem: Making patience feel like gameplay
Tap Sports Fishing extended Glu's Tap Sports franchise into a new sport, built on the same formula: approachable controls, collection and upgrade loops, and competitive events. The pitch was the most realistic fishing experience on mobile, with 3D environments, hundreds of species, sonar and attractant mechanics, lure collection and upgrades, unlockable locations around the world, real-time PvP, and tournaments.
I joined in December 2019, coming directly off the Madden play call work at EA Tiburon, and worked on the front-end UI and UX through soft launch. In 2021, EA acquired Glu, which put me back inside the company I had just left.
Fishing is a slow sport. Tap Sports is a fast brand. The core tension was making patience feel like gameplay. A cast, a wait, a strike, and a fight had to feel like a satisfying loop in a genre where players expect to tap something every second.
Around that loop sat a full mid-core meta: gear and lure collection, upgrade paths, a store, a world map of locations with their own species, PvP matchmaking, tournaments, and Crews, where teams managed members, competed on daily and weekly cadences, and moved through promotion and relegation across seasons. The UI had to hold all of it without turning a relaxing fantasy into a spreadsheet.
Fishing is a slow sport. Tap Sports is a fast brand.
Because the game was in soft launch, every screen had to answer a question. Does this loop retain? Does this economy convert? Does this flow onboard? Design work was judged against those questions, not against taste.
The constraints: Ten people, two UI designers, soft-launch metrics
The research: Soft launch as research
Soft launch gave us real players in real territories. Glu ran player surveys and KPI tracking on the title, and product and design reviewed those reports together for what they said about onboarding, session flow, and where players dropped. Alongside that, we ran remote playtests with UX research and revised designs between rounds.
How it evolved: When should the first offer appear?
In late 2020, Glu publicly named the new user flow as one of the team's priorities. The first session was where that priority got tested.
The question was when players should first see store offers and upgrade prompts. Conversion was one of the numbers the game was being judged on, which made a case for showing offers early. Early retention made the opposite case. Fishing is a slow sport, and the whole design problem was making patience feel rewarding. Interrupting new players before their first good catch risked losing them before they had a reason to spend.
Both views were arguments for the business, just weighted toward different numbers. Rather than settle it on opinion, product and design treated it as what soft launch is for. We agreed on what to measure, reframed the question as one of sequencing, and looked at where players were dropping during onboarding.
The PM usually isn’t wrong. They’re protecting a different metric.
The decision: offers stayed, but moved to after the player's first real success, when an upgrade meant something. The game kept its conversion surface, and the first few minutes stayed focused on the catch.
What I did: Every screen a player touched, on one shared system
Another Senior Experience Designer and I split the interface players touched: the catch HUD, the lobby and world map, gear and upgrade flows, the store, PvP and tournament entry, Crews and team competitions, onboarding, and the live-ops economy. I also built and maintained the design system those screens shared, with one artist supporting the front end.
A team that size has no UI team. It had two of us.
A team that size has no UI team. It had two of us. We worked directly with the producer, product, engineering, and the overseas studio. I moved between wireframes, production art, and implementation review as the build needed, including scaffolding screens in Unity for handoff to dev.
- 1 of 4Split the player-facing interface with one other senior designer, from the catch HUD to the economy screens, and relied on a shared system over individual polish so two people's work read as one game.
- 2 of 4Built the design system as features came in rather than up front, so a two-person UI team could keep pace with soft launch.
- 3 of 4Scaffolded screens in Unity for handoff to dev, giving up some time on new design work so screens were checked in the build instead of breaking in handoff.
- 4 of 4Partnered with product to sequence first-session store offers after the player's first real catch, so conversion and early retention weren't competing for the same moment.
The outcome: A soft launch that didn't reach global launch
Glu listed Tap Sports Fishing among at least four new original-IP titles planned for 2021, describing it as a "social fishing game." It never reached global launch. The game was discontinued on January 31, 2022, with Glu thanking its "small but dedicated community."
The business conditions changed during soft launch too. In April 2021, Apple shipped iOS 14.5 with App Tracking Transparency, which required users to opt in before apps could access the IDFA identifier. For publishers that relied on targeted user acquisition, finding and measuring quality players got more expensive almost overnight. Tap Sports Fishing was being evaluated on acquisition cost and early retention right as those numbers got harder to hit.
What it taught me: What it taught me
- 01Find the number you both care about. When product and design disagree, the fastest path is agreeing on how you'd know who's right. The PM usually isn't wrong. They're protecting a different metric, and the job is to design something that serves both.
- 02Soft launch is a research method. Every screen was a hypothesis with a metric attached. I bring that habit of designing to be measured to every product now.
- 03Ship the game you can ship with the team you have. Ten people and an overseas partner built a full 3D sports sim with PvP, Crews, and live ops. Scope discipline was the whole game.
- 04Be honest about what you can show. We don't have the post-change numbers to share, and we won't invent them. What the work shows is how decisions got made: tied to metrics product and design both cared about, and built so soft launch would tell us which way was right.
- 05A sunset is not a failure of craft. The work was real, and the players who stayed were dedicated. I'd rather explain clearly how it ended than pretend everything I touched shipped to a hundred million people.