So my job as a team lead is to make sure that the team can create high-quality levels and make regular deliveries. We utilize extensive quality control to ensure that levels match UX guidelines and the client’s requirements. Usually, we provide clients with batches of tested, polished levels weekly. Also, we often receive requests to create levels with specific difficulty rates or with some special time-limited event or levels that would be enough for 28 days of retention. Tile matching game development requires new content, a particular amount of levels, over a certain period. Tile Games & Match 3 Games Level Design as a Service: How It’s Done What are the customers’ usual requests? The team has created levels according to different customer requirements, game types, and needed emotional UX for over two years now. Our team consists of several level designers working on different projects with match-3, line, tap-2, bubble shooter, and other mechanics. We provide our customers with a manual tile game level design service. Only a few battle match-3 games use one size and rectangular shape of the field because they don’t use blockers, and the ‘enemies’ stand beyond the field. The industry now sticks to crafting its levels manually. Some titles tried procedural generation to cut costs, but in most cases, generated levels were either impossible to pass, too easy, or just dull. Many gaming companies design levels for tile games by copying their successful rivals’ approach to level design. Nowadays, several new tile-based casual games are released every week. In the 2010s, Candy Crush Saga for mobile phones showed that you could make billions on good match-3 level design. The market truly exploded on mobile devices. In the 2000s, PC and browser casual games started using manual level design: level designers now created different grids, preset blockers, and boosters. Since then, the genre has evolved tremendously. The shape of all the levels in the game was similar. At first, tile-matching games didn’t use a manual level design. The first very similar mechanics to the contemporary match-3 game was introduced in the Shariki game, developed by programmer Eugene Alemzhin in 1994. The first tile-based casual game was Tetris, released in 1984 by programmer Alexey Pajitnov. How casual level design has changed during the history of the genre? Such differences make the level creation process for tile puzzle games utterly different from the classic one. The main challenges for a level designer are to create a playable game field, find fun mechanics combinations, predict player’s progression, and set a target difficulty rate.Īlso, we don’t work with lightning or camera settings since the camera position is predefined and fixed. In casual mobile games like match-3, bubble shooters, blast, or line games, this environment is mainly a 2D field with a grid, where a player interacts with game elements using simple mechanics like a tap, swipe, or drag-n-drop. Depending on the genre, the environment may be an open territory, a battlefield, or an apartment. It can be the core of an active phase of the game, its locales, stages, and missions. What is level design?īeing a part of the game development, the level design is a process of creating a game environment where players spend most of the time. Tile-matching Games Level Design In The History Of Video Gaming Let’s start with a definition. In this article, Darina Emelyantseva, Lead Level Designer and Game Economy Designer at Room 8 Studio, shares the peculiar secrets of the level design: why the industry sticks to manual craft and the latest know-how. Since the burst of puzzle games’ popularity over a decade ago, the art of crafting an engaging play has become a standalone profession and service. In casual tile-matching games, the high-quality level design is key to success.
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