It should also fit in in terms of scale and level of detail. You should make sure that the element doesn’t stand out too much and doesn’t get lost because of its color. It’s very important to keep that in mind and take it into account in advance. It’ll coexist with other elements and features. Once we’ve prepared the properties of the element, it’s important to check them against the general visuals of the game. When the player sees one of these elements on the match-3 field, they immediately identify it as unique and begin to strategize about how they can use it. In Gardenscapes, each booster has a small, glowing animation. This is one of its properties.Īnother example is boosters. So the player understands that the Box is tied to the field and isn’t going anywhere. Blockers, like Boxes, are elements that fill a tile, leaving no empty space. Take the blockers in Gardenscapes, for example. Each element can have a number of properties - it all depends on the individual element. Once we’ve understood the setting, we can choose the element’s properties. There are no fantastical objects with amorphous properties in the game. They’re all either the elements of a garden or elements from the real world in which Austin (the game’s protagonist) lives. Gardenscapes is a game about gardening, and all match-3 elements revolve around that concept. The main difficulty lies in the fact that the player interacts with the image of the element, so it must reflect all the properties that you associate with the concept.īefore you can start working on the image, you need to define the setting of the game. This stage is no easier than the previous ones. Once we’ve decided on the concept, we move on to creating the visuals for the element. What do we get in the end? An element that’s ready and has tested well during the prototyping stage. You need to look at all of these aspects during prototyping. On this stage, we can see how the element combines with the tiles, how it combines with other match-3 elements, and how it affects the experience of the game. Stage Three: PrototypingĪfter the experts have made their decision, and we’ve selected certain mechanics, we move on to the next stage, which is prototyping. This is an important stage where we only focus on 2 or 3 elements. When we’ve put together a master list and filtered out the bad ideas, a group of experts selects 2–3 mechanics that seem the most promising. For example, we can’t choose a mechanic that isn’t triggered immediately, since it would block the field, interfere with the effects, and basically give our game a completely different feel. These features put certain limitations on the range of mechanics we can choose from. Gardenscapes, for example, is a match-3 game that allows players to continuously make matches without any pauses, with non-color-specific bonuses, and a cumulative “Lightning” bonus. ![]() How do we decide which ideas we should keep and which we should reject? It’s simple: you just need to remember the specifics of your game. ![]() We keep the good ideas and filter out the bad ones. It often happens that we have over 20 or 30 of these. ![]() Now that we’ve studied the competition, we can begin developing a new element.Īt this stage, we put all of our initial ideas into a single document. Stage Two: Generating and Filtering Ideas So you look at what they’ve done, and if it’s a good idea, you analyze it, polish it, and make it work for your project. There are a lot of cool games on the match-3 market that you absolutely have to know.īefore embarking on your own match-3 adventure, whether it’s the development of a new element or the creation of levels, you need to remember that your competitors have already done something like this. This is a very important stage that many people seem to forget. With each update, we try to add one or two new mechanics.Ĭreating a new item Stage One: Studying the Competition Half a year later, Gardenscapes already had 29 kinds of mechanics across 1,300 levels. It’s important to make it clear that we keep all the development stages in mind simultaneously and try to think ahead about any problems that may arise in the future.īack in 2016, when we soft-launched, we had 16 kinds of mechanics across 300 levels. The things that I am going to talk about and that I break up into separate points are development milestones. I’ll also touch on analytics and A/B testing. I’d like to talk about one of the most interesting stages in a match-3 project – creating new elements. Īt Playrix, I’m in charge of match-3 gameplay in Gardenscapes. What follows is an edited transcript of Aleksandr’s presentation at White Nights St.Petersburg.
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