Cookie Crush is Softgames flagship on Facebook Instant Games with 2,1 million unique players. This is a very social oriented match-3 game that takes the player to a world of sweetness in order to solve over 1000 levels. I love working on this game as there is much more ressources than for other products. It is also very satisfying to get direct feedback from the player in terms of revenue, retention and fun.
Most of my duties in this game revolve around content creation and balancing:
- Gameplay Balancing : constantly checking the game for gameplay for improvements and create tickets for devs
- In level elements design and prototyping: boosters, blockers, blockers interactions...
- Event Design: Christmas, Easter...
- Levels Creation
- Levels Balancing
I started working on the original Cookie Crush more than a year and a half ago and it is truely rewarding to see how the game has evolved and how much more potential to grow it offers.
Solitaire Story is Softgames second best earning Instant Game and is played by 1,1 millions unique users. The game takes the player through more than 400 levels in which they have to solve card based puzzles in order to progress and discover new environments.
For the past 4 months I have been in charge of content design for this game:
- In level elements design and prototyping (boosters, special cards...)
- Levels Creation
- Levels Balancing
This game is constantly evolving and reaching new records in terms of revenues and retention, it definitely has a bright future in front of it and we're are continuously working on improving it.
One of my favorite projects to work on, I designed the first time user experience and balanced the economics. After release, the game reiceved some mild success but never made it to our top earning list. This game was a candidate to be upgraded and ported to Facebook Instant Games but it did not make to release as there was already too many games of this gender and the code was too messy to be reused without a lot of effort.
Little Farm Clicker
I was working on different versions of the solitaire at the same time and this one is the first one that came up. The aim of this project was to make a very clean and simple version of different type of solitaires to attract a public a bit older. The game received some good promotion on some of our partners networks and is still returning a good profit.
Best Classic - Spider Solitaire
Yatzy Aces
I took over the Yatzy Aces project after another game designer left the company. The main idea was to improve the FTUE and release a very simple and fun to play game as soon as possible. Since this project had been open for a while, part of the difficulty was to negotiate with the developer to modify some features, add new ones, balance the difficulty and improve the performances of the game. I am quite happy with the end result considering the time I had to work on this game and the different obstacles I encountered.
Tap and Go is a very addictive and cute looking tap game that was my first project, I really enjoyed working on this simple game. I was in charge of designing the game's rules, features and tutorial as well as coordinating the work of the developer studio and make sure to respect the deadlines.
The monetization system of this game was originally ad-based but it has been changed since its released and is now getting transformed to a freemium model.
The game features an hourly reward system to increase retention, it allows the player to try and win some coins or boosters. There is also an in-game shop that allows the player to buy new skins or booster against in-game currency.
After working on the levels balancing of Bike Racing, I was put in charge of designing all the levels of the following title, for that I used the editor Tiled (http://www.mapeditor.org/).
I began by designing a few simple levels, then started adding some basic obstacles like loops and jumps to allow the player to familiarize with the controls.
Bike Racing 2 was designed to be a difficult game so I had to make sure the difficulty would keep increasing through the levels to keep the players entertained and make sure they would keep on watching incentivized ads to get more lives. One of the issue I encountered was that the game didn't include any elements of level design, so I had to create everything with static black lines. Also, as soon as I would use too many lines, the performances of the game would drop. This pushed me to get creative and create other types of obstacles like tubes and spikes or by forcing him to think differently (go backward in a level). I also decided to create some levels that offered different ways to beat them.
For the last levels I wanted to add a bit of originality to keep the players entertained and maintain retention so I decided to add some environments to the levels. All the images you can see below are of the actual levels, the player has to to ride through each one of them in order to win.
My work on this game started by taking part in the creation of the game and especially designing additional boosters and mechanics features as well as suggest modifications to the level editor.
I had already created around 200 levels for the first opus with the first version of the homemade editor so I was charged to create another 500 levels in this new game, mainly for the Japanese market. I proceeded to introduce the new features and boosters regularly to ease the player into the game while slowly raising the difficulty.
Since I created levels for the first versions of these games I took part in designing new game features and transforming the homemade level editor in order to be able to play with the different features to make the levels as entertaining as possible.
This two match-3 games were using very similar engines with homemade editors. I created around 400 levels for Candy Rain 4 and 300 levels for Jewels Blitz 2.
One of the main difficulty in creating so much content was to keep on creating original levels without being able to add new features.
Some Other Games
(level design & balancing)
