Bejeweled Stars- Match-3 Level Design
Bejeweled Stars is a Match 3 puzzle game. Bejeweled Stars is mainly for curious puzzle solvers. It is one of the first match 3 games made. It can be considered as the inspiration behind the famous Candy Crush saga. The main target audience for this game is 45+ women. The main game of Bejeweled Stars consists of islands of different themes which in turn contain the levels related to that theme for which I worked on the level design.
My Contributions
Live Services – Level Design & Balancing for Bejeweled Stars
As a Level Designer for Bejeweled Stars, my role focused on creating and refining engaging match-3 levels to enhance player retention and satisfaction. My responsibilities were divided into two key phases:
-
Level Design
-
Designed compelling and varied levels, ensuring a smooth difficulty curve.
-
Integrated core mechanics, obstacles, and power-ups to maintain engagement.
-
Created wireframes and prototypes to test level flow and player interaction.
-
-
Level Balancing & Iteration
-
Analyzed player data to adjust difficulty, move limits, and progression pacing.
-
Conducted playtests and fine-tuned mechanics for optimal challenge and fun.
-
Collaborated with data analysts and game designers to optimize engagement and retention.
-
Level Design Process
To design levels, PopCap has its tool in unity which takes care of all the mechanics of a Bejeweled Stars Level. The level design process goes in this order:
-
Create a base for the board
-
Use the elements as needed
-
Set the goals
-
Set the limits
-
Set the gem drop sequence
01
Base of the board
The board is of an 8x8 grid. Design of the board by itself can make a level easy or difficult. Board design is one of the high-level controls to manage the difficulty, any board can be cleared if provided with sufficient moves to clear the level. E.g.: Boards with more cells tend to have a better chance of creating more special gems compared to that of one with few cells.
02
Use Elements as Needed
Elements are the different mechanics that can be used on top of the board designed in the previous step.
Each mechanic has different levels. Using a higher-level mechanic will make the board more difficult.
03 Set the Goals
04 Set the Limits
Goals for the level is the objective of the level. Goals can be adjusted to make a level easy or hard. Example: Clear all the dirt. Collect 15 butterfly
The limits of a board are mostly the number of moves given to clear the level. Moves are one of the main levers to control the difficulty of a level. The higher the moves easier the level. Example: Finish the level in 30 moves Do not let any butterflies escape.
05
Set the Gem Drop Sequence
The Drop Sequence determines how many colours of gems can drop at a given time.
The gem drop sequence is crucial to the success of Bejeweled. At the outset of the game, the number of gems on the board is kept low; however, as the game progresses, the number of gems increases, making the level harder but not impossible. This design ensures that players do not feel overwhelmed initially, but as the board becomes increasingly challenging, they begin to invest more effort into winning. Achieving victory on a difficult board yields greater satisfaction.
06 Level Design Conclusion
At the end of this phase, the designer must: Playtest the level to see if the level does not have any bugs and is fun to play. Also, the mechanics must be used in such a way that they have a purpose in the puzzle. A list of levels needed for the next release is prepared according to the theme of the Island that is to be released. After the above has been done, the board design will be pretty much locked and will not be altered after this phase.
Level Balancing
STEP 1:
The level is tested by the designer as well as the QA to get an idea of the level's difficulty. First, the designers manually test the level and assign a difficulty score based on their intuition.
STEP 2:
Giving the levels to the QA with a set of instructions to test those levels for feedback. Some of the instructions include:
1) How many tries did it take to finish the level? (1- easy, 15- difficult). One level is played 10 times. The difficulty scores are then averaged.
2) What was the objective that was remaining incomplete if the QA was not able to finish the level?
3) For the 10 attempts the scores obtained is also noted.
Step 3:
Use the feedback to refine and optimize the levels further for the release. To refine the levels i.e., to make them easy or hard the designer uses the secondary difficulty levers that is the levels of mechanics or the gem drop sequence etc. After refining the levels the levels are arranged according to their difficulty score given by the Q&A. More about the arrangement is explained in the next section. This phase also helps in finding all level-related bugs.
Level Arrangement
Any F2P game that has levels which the players must progress in an order must be arranged according to the saw tooth graph of difficulty as shown below:
Key Takeaways
Understanding the Live Services Design Process
-
Level Design & Balancing in Live Games: Working on Bejeweled Stars provided hands-on experience in designing and fine-tuning levels, ensuring a smooth difficulty curve and player retention through iterative balancing.