Dennis Lorenz

The Cycle: Frontier is a free-to-play PvPvE Extraction Shooter driven by suspense and danger. Prospect for resources and other riches on an abandoned alien world ravaged by a deadly storm, inhabited by monsters, and frequently raided by other ambitious Prospectors. 

With The Cycle, for the first time in my career I had the opportunity to work on a major production from the very start.  Throughout that time, I produced its first Map,  all customization and monetization content released up until the relaunch as The Cycle: Frontier, handled localization, and worked as part of the publishing team. 

After nearly 3 years on The Cycle, some of the personal highlights so far for me have been:

• Working out the approach of how we would structure the project, in terms of methodology as well as tools with the production team, and being an ambassador for the culture we wanted to establish for the team. 
• Working out the map design as we were both defining and building the core second-to-second gameplay – we looked at many reference games, defined guidelines of what we believed would make a  „good“ map, researched new tools for building it, gathering feedback etc.
• Oversaw a co-development project we did simultaneously early into the project.
• Started our self-publishing efforts, early community management, involved in the process of staffing that department, and nowadays serving as a coordinator for them. 
• Owning Localization, adding new languages, establishing processes that integrate into live operations.
• Advocating for and owning presences at Expos – I had the chance to organize presences at MAG 2018 & 2019, as well as Gamescom 2019. 
• Trailer Production 
• Overseeing external music and key art production.
• Seeing the game go live for players! 
• Seeing the CCU increase with major marketing beats we worked on for months.

With the release of the initial Early Access version of The Cycle, main responsibility is the creation of all monetized content. I drove all e-com topics and own the production from concept to implementation. As part of this, I also drove the season passes of The Cycle – creating sets of 100+ customization items at a 3-4 month cadence, as well as the regular shop content updates. I worked with various teams and owned new features related to monetization content, and ensured it is consistently represented across all generated materials. 

You can check out the game here: thecycle.game, as well as in the screenshots in the carousel above, or the official launch trailer: