Bejeweled Blitz Improvements

Bejeweled Blitz is a free-to-play, casual match 3 puzzle game developed by Popcap and published by EA in 2010. It is a fast-paced competitive game with many interesting mechanics like boosts, rare gems and various other parameters the players enjoy in a 60-second session. The players compete for high scores on the leaderboard. The game’s main audience is Women of the age group 45+. Bejeweled Blitz is a game for competitive players interested in solving puzzles. Therefore the game largely involves asynchronous competition, leader-board, and match3 puzzles with various parameters that keep changing to add challenge to the puzzle.

My contributions

A detailed study of player motivation was conducted.
A deconstruction of Bejeweled Blitz was performed, involving an analysis of the game's core loop, in-game systems, mechanics, economy, social elements, user experience, etc.
A thorough analysis was undertaken to determine which systems should be designed to enhance the game in terms of engagement. A detailed design of the minimum viable product of a daily task system was completed.
To expedite the design process, a boost design framework was developed to streamline the design of the boosts effectively.

Target Audience

The main target audience of Bejeweled Blitz is women of the age group of 45+ years.
The players of Bejeweled Blitz are categorized into 3 types based on their motivations to play the game:
- Steady Advancers: In the game, they are the ones who complete the daily tasks or compete in an event on time, collect rare gems and like to achieve the maximum level of a boost.
- Curious Solver: For Bejeweled Blitz, they are the ones who keep repeating the daily challenge till they beat the target score and all their friends' scores. They also enjoy new objectives in the game and adopt new features quite readily.
- Competitive Achievers: they are the ones who compete in the leaderboards boast about their scores in social communities and like to challenge other players to reach their scores.

Core loop and Game Mechanics

Match mechanic: match3, match4, match5 and match6 and above produces different results
Randomizers: Cascading sequences (gems falling from top of the board as a result of matching) is random and can lead to intermittent rewards.
Scoring System: Score produced as a result of the types of matches created by the player.
Blitz: Play fast. Make highest score possible in 60s.

Challenges of the game

For bejeweled Blitz, it was recorded that the number of sessions/ user and the session length is low.
The game also needed to improve the number of returning players.
Bejeweled Blitz also lacked a universal meaningful progression system. No system made sure that the player goes through all the game's features daily.
This is key in improving the overall retention and monetization of the game.

Solution 1: Daily Task System

A Task System is a list of tasks that can be completed by participating or strategically grinding in return for rewards.
Thorough research was conducted to understand how task systems function.
After the research, the Daily Task systems were categorized into 4 main types as seen in the table.

DTS of Bejeweled Blitz

A daily task system that is suitable for the target audience of Bejeweled Blitz and that meets the needs of the game is an intersection between the Repetitive task system and the variety task system.
The story daily task system was not suitable because Bejeweled Blitz is not inherently a story-based game and the audience would not care much about it.
The Progression Daily Task system is not suitable because Bejeweled Blitz has no way to track progression. However, the DTS would include progression within it, and in the future, different badges can be given to players to give them bragging rights over other players.
All the parameters inside the DTS were brainstormed and how they would solve the goals of the game was validated. Some of the entities that were decided are shown in the table on the right.

Design of DTS

The DTS is divided into 2 main parts: The streak bar shows the number of days daily tasks have been completed.
The tasks part where there are a total of 8 variable tasks -50% grind, 50% skill tasks and 2 repetitive tasks.
The first and last are repetitive. Their position is static and does not change if the player scrolls the variable tasks.
The variable tasks that have been completed go to the bottom so that the incomplete tasks are easily seen by the player.

This structure shows that for every task there is a reward associated. If the player completes all the tasks for the day, they are rewarded the daily reward. If the player can do this every day for a week, they are rewarded the mega reward for keeping up the streak.
The weekly reward is perfect because even if the player fails to complete a day's tasks, they can continue with the other day's tasks and get a reward associated with the number of days they have completed tasks

Task List

A task list was brainstormed that shows the mode the task belong to, the type of task, the actual task, number of game required to finish the task and the number of sessions required to finish the task.

Final Mockups

In the beginning, the tasks are arranged with respect to their difficulty.
Once a task is finished it goes down.
All the tasks are then sorted to put the tasks again in difficulty order.

DTS Bankend tools

A backend tool was prepared to show the development team how one must set the parameters of the Daily Task System.
The daily tasks system is such that the tasks shown to the committed player are different from the uncommitted players.
Every column is a different drop down button. If the designer selects one of the parameters under each drop down, the result task created would be as shown in the last column.

Solution 2: Boost Design

One of the company's requirements was a boost design framework that makes the process of designing boosts easy, fast and efficient.
To do this, one has to understand what is the role of boosts in the game. Boosts are game enhancers that give the player a better score, coins, new gameplay and more fun.
A maximum of 3 boosts can be equipped before the game.
Every boost can be upgraded. Boost upgrades increase their number of uses and give a higher score Boost upgrade is permanent and goes from level 1 to level 11.
Premium currencies are used to upgrade boosts.

Needs of the company

My Process

Analysis of existing boosts

Skill vs Score of existing boosts

The above graph shows the skill vs score of all existing boosts during the internship.
Gameplay gaps show that no boost has been created that gives that particular score required that much skill. But in Bejeweled Blitz, it is seen that the boosts that do well among the audience are those that have high scores but low skills. Also, most of low-skill boosts are passive boosts. Example: Detonator, Multiplier, Mystery etc. Therefore it is wise to make a boost that will either fall in this category or will involve such a boost in a combo