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.

Gardenscapes level 165