Minimal Design, Maximum Impact: Puzzle Game Design in Hypercasual Games

[Music] so puzzle game design one of the things that a it's very interesting about puzzle game design is that because of the nature and the history of possible games we have a conception on on how they work that is not necessarily while successful on mobile games or in mass-market games we usually see in the market in love with a lot of games puzzle games that come out in in the app stores and they usually get a high peak

the genre's popular because puzzle games are really popular among the players who are playing mobile games but interesting enough then they drop off signe way faster than all the topo games and a lot of people claim that it might be because people get bored with these games and I have a different theory and the theory big comes from how we consider the design of puzzle games so this is a really great YouTube channel con game makers toolkit how many people know this channel good good that's a decent number but everybody else should actually check it out because Marc Brown does a very good job explaining a lot of a game design in Dickens's however he's wrong in how he describes puzzle games and what so we first we're gonna see how his Christ's puzzle games every puzzle

game starts with its mechanics a set of ironclad rules that govern how the game works so in a game like cosmic Express you can draw train tracks on a grid but you can't cross over the tracks one alien can jump into each train car and then hop out into the first box of the same color they pass by so what's interesting are this and and the rest of the video shows games such as the talus principle for example and a the he goes on and on about this this tenet of you have a challenge ahead of you and there is one way of solving it and it's up to the player to figure out how to actually put the pieces together and and move on and solve it the problem with this is that these are not mass-market puzzle games why

well there's multiple reasons and we're gonna go over why but the first one is that this only one solution and that's a huge huge problem why because besides the fact the obvious fact that there's only one way to solve them is that the player has to backtrack directions every time they make a mistake and they feeling dumb and if you're a casual game designer or a mobile game designer you know that this is the first main issue that you should never do in a mobile game right so the whole concept of how you assign puzzle games is wrong from from that perspective right and because at the end of the day if a player gives the player will give up the the mobile player will give up because at the end of the day is they stop thinking they start trying this way this versus this way there's no strategic decisions there's no reward because always punished shipment right so let's review what a mass-market

puzzle game actually does right so we're going to look at puzzle games that actually stay in the market for longer than just a couple of weeks and we're gonna start with the obvious one so we have a screenshot of candy crush saga and this is the screen right now and there's different possibilities right there's no only one solution there's only one action that the player can do right now there are different ones which one do you think the player should do can somebody call on it what's up green exactly right the green is the best option right now in terms of points right because it's gonna give your mom however I can start with a blue and if I do the blue I still score points I still have the green to do it next so the the great thing about match three game design is that there are

multiple ways of achieving solution you're not punishing the player because they see the green some of you maybe didn't see the green you Sylvia loose you have a number of moves before you actually lose the game so it's a more relaxed activity it's a more there's more possibilities for me to actually achieve the goal of the game and still is still a possible TV strategic and we're gonna see why let's look at another example the sukkah toy blast so in toy blasts the upper left I have my objective right those are the number of pieces that I need to much in order to solve the level in this example I have 23 purple and 19 yellow that I still need to go so there's different ways different things I can do right now right right what can I do what's up purple right exactly and these different

types of purple groups that I can select right so the first one would be that one over there path so I can select the Reds first in order to get a bigger purple right that was a strategic decision I gave the player the possibility of not only achieving the solution in different ways but also I gave them a framework for them to sink another action that ultimately gives them a bigger reward and that's super super key you don't punish the player along the way but also you allow them to make interesting decisions and that's key in the framework or your password game let's look at another thing [Music]

what happened here I because of a move that I did it triggered a series of a scale effects and the game told me that what I did is divine okay so every human being has something called a reward system and the reward system is is fed by a cape by a chemical component called dopamine every time candy crush tells you what you did is divine your body generates dopamine which enters into your reward system and makes you feel good the other things that make you feel good besides that are sex I'm full okay and this is why I can you guys do this as well right so you need to make sure that every time you are giving the player an opportunity to feel awesome make sure they know that

they're awesome compare that to marks around examples of puzzle games right oh you have to do this level 37 times before I tell you that you passed it see the contrast and in game design we use this tenet as a tenet of good puzzle game design ways the absolute opposite of what we should be doing so we look in the games that generally have bigger teams and my if you've seen me talking Helsinki a based on on the number of things I'm doing right now on the number of talks on doing right now I try to always bring examples of games that are being made by small teams because I'm also a small team and so we're gonna look at the game how many people familiar with this game by the way okay this was my favorite puzzle game of 2018 and a if you know

merge two dragons for example which is in the top grossing chart in Iran is a successor of muscle mesh so what's most miserable most image it's a game where you have a grid every so often this monsters pop up and if you have two monsters of the same kind you can join them together in order to create a higher-level monster and your goal is to position them around wells in order to make money so it's a combination of puzzle and either love same time it was very innovative when it came out and and I thought it was fantastic and as you continue emerging you are able to create monsters of a higher caliber and a certain point when you are a creating a monster of a higher level for the first time you achieve a new level indigent so you have a clear representation of problems so what are

the components that make this game so fun one is you see the plane again going back to puzzle game design in mass-market puzzle games would always allow the player to have a vision of what the possibilities are we don't office Kate information we don't obfuscate the gameplay elements we actually show everything to you and it's up to you to figure out how to put them together and this another thing that's also super important is and going back to watch three for second this always one chance it's very rare that you get that level in much three where there are no matches available right it's actually a balanced fail usually when that happens so in 99.9 percent of the cases you do have one match that you can actually do and that's part of the balancing and

that allows the player to say well there's no possibility for me to progress however I can do this much hoping that the next move is something I can I can make some progress and that's how so an opportunity for the player to redeem themselves right there's no this until the last move there's always a possibility of actually win the only thing that's also very important is strategy in in this this particular set of screenshots on the on the Left I have multiple opportunities right I can match this one with this one this one this one right this one this one right I can make this choice in the same way as we were looking at the match three level and there were three or four different much possibilities right we always need to be able to provide the player as much as we can for different opportunities so they

don't have to think too hard they'll have to look a an entire grid until they find that one match available would you can balance the game to be challenging but at the same time allow the player to have multiple opportunities to achieve the progress the last element is progression you can see in this and this shot in this video how the player is going to generate a chain of matches that will allow them to reach a monster of a higher level and when you reach a higher level when you complete the the the reward and the reward generates dopamine and titillated esterday and that's very important and it's very important that is happening in several iterations through throughout the course of the game so a clear representation of progress that a player can be CVC was the next valor all times in conclusion

let's go over each of the points today I'm a great great mass market puzzle games have multiple ways to achieve a solution they don't punish you along the way they allow you to make mistakes and recover yourself and in many cases you are able to recover yourself you have to make perfect moves across the entire level they reward you often they constantly remind you how awesome you are when you do something also I wanna do something well right and it's important and it's important that you never use it at the same time they allow the player to see the play they don't office Kate information however you always provide the player with the options and underneath in in their faces and they allow the player to strategize to really come up with any strategy at

seeing one two or three moves ahead of them and this is also a very important component if you can design a framework where the player can actually plan one two three moves ahead oh what a move that are going to do next you have a great game because it allows the player to feel we rewarded if those three moves are executed successfully and their multiple games the multiple board games that do this really really well but match three and group matching is a great example of doing that extremely well lastly have a clear representation of progress prowess needs to be defined visually on your UI UX and it needs to be available at all times for the player to see where are they at compared to the last move and where they could be in the next move so you should never obfuscate

the chances for the player to be successful or not and that's what I have for you guys but we have plenty of time and I would love to answer any questions are actually having an open conversation about this because the controversial topic in in many ways especially among independent gaming signers and a another thing is I'm a very approachable person if you see me if you're not comfortable talking in public with a big group of people and like to talk and you see me outside at the show feel free to approach me and come and talk to me I always talked a lot to talk to other fellow developers about game design you [Music]