Senior Content Designer ∙ Match-3 Puzzle Game ∙ King
I’m fortunate to work on a well-known worldwide mobile game IP, the makers of the legendary Candy Crush Saga comes Candy Crush Soda Saga in the Sweden Stockholm office Unique candies. More divine matching combinations, and challenging game modes brimming with purple soda and fun!
This mouth-watering puzzle adventure will instantly quench your thirst for fun. Join Kimmy on her juicy journey to find Tiffi, by switching and matching your way through new dimensions of magical gameplay. Take on this Sodalicious Saga alone or play with friends to see who can get the highest score!
Contributions
Since I joined as a Senior Content Designer, the team has grown from 4 designers to around 12 people, and my contributions cross many aspects. Supported match-3 level creation (created more than 500 levels), making new game elements, new game modes, tuning the levels according to the player’s data, and assisted the team in establishing the best practice guideline of match-3 levels, creating documents and tools to ramp up the development process and more.
‣ Creating levels, game modes, and tuning the game mechanics by analyzing user data for Candy Crush Soda Saga.
‣ Established best practices for level designs and run a quarterly alignment meeting to discuss improvements with the team.
‣ Mentor junior designers by hosting internal training sessions to help the team members grow towards their desired career path.
‣ Present new designs and game features/mechanics at quarterly meetings to inspire the team and advance the Soda design vision.
‣ Review outsourced levels and provide feedback to the external team to assist them in matching the desired design quality.
Achievement
One of the most significant contributions was creating a systematic design to create in-game elements called Blocker, which became a talk I gave in GDC 2020 summer.
At King, we see blockers as enemies in our casual games, similar to traditional enemies in hardcore games. It is common to use stats to break down enemies in hardcore games. So why don’t we have a system to break down the blockers in match-3 puzzle games? During my time at King, I created a new set of stats for blockers that can use as a common design language across all of our studios. The new set of stats helps designers, artists, producers, developers, and even players better understand a blocker’s behavior and allows us to design them in the game.
Lucien Chen 