Match-3 Games: Feature Proposal from a Stranger

Disclaimer

This proposal is solely intended for my personal experimentation on game design. It is not requested by or submitted to the OutPlay Entertainment. I have no connection or affiliation with them. So, have fun while reading it and feel free to drop any comments.

I had fun while comparing two games, as I discussed in “Farm Heroes Saga vs Mystery Match: Deconstruction Comparison” article, and I didn't stopped & decided to create a fake "Feature Proposal" about one of these games. As I mentioned before, Farm Heroes Saga is walking on the boundaries of being a feature creep game while perfectly staying behind the line. So it was a better idea to focus on Mystery Match to design a new feature...

UPDATE: I've also published this article in Gamasutra. If you have comments please don't hesitate to share.

Feature Proposal: Evidence Map

As I discussed in “Farm Heroes Saga vs Mystery Match: Deconstruction Comparison” article, Mystery Match is a match-3 game with a narrative grabber and a minimal economy & UI structure. As I analyzed, it fails to build early retention factors because of early grinding and lack of “call to action” models. Also, I criticized Mystery Match for not creating a powerful game narrative, while its story got stucked into short dialogue cutscenes (it should be noted, however, that increasing the text depth would not push the game on a better way). It works as a nice grabber, yet it lose its power even in early phases. In novelistic structure, Mystery genre builds upon a brain challenge between the reader and the protagonist (detective). Mystery Match misses to create such a challenge that would engage players in the product.

Therefore, a new feature is needed for enforcing the early retention and helping the narrative grabber. This new feature must do this job without touching anything about the hard currency and by adding as minimal UI as possible (to follow the Mystery Match’s design pillars). On this direction, I introduce a new feature proposal: Evidence Map.

Feature Specification

Evidence map is a new map mode where the layout is the same, but instead of level buttons, there are 3-4 bigger evidence spots with question marks placed on each episode (spots placed on the outskirts of the map, not on the main road). When the player plays any level that is close to an evidence spot, with a success chance (that is 100% on first two evidence spots and very high chances on early spots, decreasing gradually on each episode and by star rankings), player unlocks an evidence. The player gets the “New Evidence Unlocked!” pop-up message and the evidence map can be reached once the level map appears.

On the evidence map, player would match two random pair of evidences for a possibility of finding a clue that reveal the story more in depth and unlock new achievements. Same pairs could be matched multiple times to repeat narration. First two pairs of evidence are going to be unlocked automatically and a tutorial will direct the player to match the first pair. After first narration, bonus tutorial ends by teaching player how to push the same button to return back to normal map.

Player is free to continue to play the next level or get into the evidence map to explore the mystery further. This way, the game flow of match-3 experience is not disturbed by longer narrative intervals, yet, the mystery narrative gets more intriguing and therefore creates an additional retention factor for the players.

Also clues will be use rewards for call back to action. Every week player will be notified with a new hint which two evidences could be matched. This is a more engaging call than any usual action calls. Also this feature could boost the virality by building a community that share the evidence matches to each other.

With this feature update, only a small change will be occur over the old UI: The “Messages” button will be moved to upper right of the map screen and “Show/Hide Evidence Map” button will be placed instead of this button.

This feature will not unlock evidences to current active users automatically. They need to unlock evidences by playing the old levels they played before. But with a small trick they will have 100% chance to unlock their evidences on previous episodes. A new panel is going to introduce this new feature to current users when they open the game first time.

Functional Requirements

• An alternate evidence map with no level buttons but 3-4 empty evidence spots on each episode over the map

• “Show/Hide Evidence Map” button that change the map modes

• “New Evidence Unlocked!” popup text that activates the new evidence over the empty evidence spot. It can be closed by just tapping anywhere and it will be auto closed after a short period.

• Evidence buttons activates over the evidence map while respectful evidences are unlocked, this buttons work like checkboxes and they could be matched in any pairs.

• At the bottom of the map UI, Two “match slots” become visible when the first evidence is selected. First slot shows the first selected evidence

• Tapping over the first slot clear the first evidence selected and hide the “match slots”

• Second “match slot” shows the second selected evidence when the second evidence is selected

• If selected evidences match, the “match slots” starts glow animation, then after a second “match slots” disappears and selected buttons return to their unchecked states

• If selected evidences not match, the “match slots” immediately disappears and selected buttons return to their unchecked states

• If selected evidences matches together a popup text opens gives back matching feedback

• A fast animated “Not Matching” popup text that will be shown when not related evidence matching done that could be closed by just tapping anywhere and auto closed after a small period

• A fast animated “Clue Already Found” popup text that will be shown when a correct evidence matching done that could be closed by just tapping anywhere and auto closed after a small period

• A fast animated “New Clue Found” popup text that will be shown when a correct evidence matching done first time that could be closed by just tapping anywhere and auto closed after a small period

• New story screens after each correct evidence matching that could be repeated multiple times

• New achievements on all platforms that unlocks after each new clue found

• New tutorial screen for first evidence matching

• New panel for introducing this new feature for existing players. It will be automatically opened once on game start.

• New notification sended each week that gives hint about a random pair of matching evidences.

Validation Proposal

Major reason for this feature is increasing the early engagement and retention so, 1 week of testing the feature on a small group of new users (and possible iterations) would be needed before the actual validation process. Then actual validation must be done separately on two individual groups:

• New users

• Pay users

A/B Testing must be applied for both groups. Minimum condition for validation should be:

• Increase on KPI’s for new users

• All KPI’s must stay stable for pay users

These KPI’s are the expected to gain a boost with the feature and must be closely monitored during validation:

• Sticky Factor (DAU/MAU Ratio)

• Retention Rate and Churn Rate

Also some KPI’s must be closely observed especially on already pay users. By this feature, these KPI’s must at least stay stable:

• DAU

• MAU

• ARPPU

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) / Lifetime Value (LTV)

Match-3 Games: Farm Heroes Saga vs Mystery Match

Disclaimer

These deconstructions are solely intended for my personal experimentation on game design. It is not requested by or submitted to any of the related companies and I have no connection or affiliation with any of them. So, have fun while reading it and feel free to drop any comments.

I have a broad proficiency on designing game-as-a-product projects, and my experience in game-as-a-service design have started only recently. My main motivation for writing this article was summarizing my early F2P design knowledge and discuss with others what could be researched by just comparing two similar products.

UPDATE: I didn't stopped and decided to create a fake "Feature Proposal" about one of these games. You can check it from here... I've also published this article in Gamasutra. If you have comments please don't hesitate to share.

Introduction

In this article, I am going to deconstruct and compare two Match-3 games: Farm Heroes Saga and Mystery Match in regard to their economy loops, UI / UX designs, narratives, gameplay, social and retention factors to understand better about their dynamics. Before starting these comparisons, let’s take a look in both games AppAnnie statistics:

Farm Heroes Saga is released by King on March 2013 and currently have 100.000.000 - 500.000.000 downloads on Android and 10.000.000+ monthly active users on Facebook platform.

Mystery Match Farm is released by Outplay on September 2014 and currently have 500.000 - 1.000.000 downloads on Android and 50.000+ monthly active users on Facebook platform.

Comparison Summary

The main design choice difference between Mystery Match and Farm Heroes Saga is their approach to use/avoid soft currency:

Lack of soft currency pushes Mystery Match to a minimal economy design, and focus its game design on narrative and core game mechanics. Without a soft currency, there is no ground left for additional meta-game elements (ex: playing old levels to collect bonus for weekly / holiday challenges before starting any new and hard level on Farm Heroes Saga) and this choice leads Mystery Match to a minimalist UI / UX design approach. This choice also encapsulates an earlier grinding requirement on difficulty curve, needed for a the first day retention (call back to action). The only option for first day retention is to get the player stuck in a level with no lives left and call player back for another refreshed set of lives. Difficulty must increase very early to create that condition inside the first session. The narrative plot focused on mystery, (considering that the major target audience for match-3 genre is soccer moms) works also as a nice grabber for first day retention in Mystery Match. But in the long term, Mystery Match tries an impossible mission of writing a mystery script that involves lots of match-3 puzzles and narrating it via just character images with very short dialogues or monologues. Nevertheless, a clear and fluent UI design, detailed art direction and brilliant ludology behind it have the most significant role on its game developer’s (Outplay) success.

Meanwhile, Farm Heroes Saga employs a layered economy loop with both soft and hard currencies involved. That complexity pushes Farm Heroes Saga to expand the core gameplay by integrating its economical variables. With such complexity, Farm Heroes Saga walks on the boundaries of being a “Feature Creep” game and still perfectly avoids falling into it. It also assembles a well managed UI / UX that becomes a big part of the game. Farm Heroes Saga needs a long time to successfully introduce its elements and converts this phase to a long spanned difficulty curve. This long span has two effects: Good side of the coin is a (possibly) fast finished first session, which gives more reasons for calling the player back to action (other than the energy renewal call), because there are many features left to explore! The bad side of the coin is the latency of the grabber (the “Companions”), since it would not be encountered before the first session and even before the second session. The developers must have sensed the same problem; so they’ve chosen to expose the grabber related UI before introducing the grabber itself. Even though, game developer (King) successfully constructed the successor of Candy Crush Saga by creating a more detailed match-3 game with a good grabber. In this sense, Farm Heroes Saga illustrates perfectly the casual gamer's new expectations. That expectation pushing the genre into more mature game designs.

Both Mystery Match and Farm Heroes Saga avoid the “Coercive Monetization” model while both of them still stick to a classic freemium transition from a “Skill Game” to a “Money Game”. Especially for Mystery Match, simplified layerless economy increases VoC (Visibility of Control) and creates a greater TtC (Tolerance to Control) barrier that would cause a lower monetization rate. Farm Heroes Saga’s layered economy creates a more blurry VoC that would directly affect a higher monetization rate.

Core Economy Loop

As I discussed on Comparison Summary section, Mystery Match lacks soft currency, and

even by comparing at the core level, Farm Heroes Saga’s economy loop complexity is higher than Mystery Match. This basic difference leads two games to separate design choices, which will be discussed in further sections.

Economy Loop In Depth

The deconstruction of both games’ economy loops in larger scale demonstrates the complexity difference between Farm Heroes Saga and Mystery Match economies clearer.

Mystery Match’s economy differs from Farm Heroes Saga in two important ways: Lack of a soft currency (that feed player income by each successful basic levels or weekly / holiday challenges, achievements, etc.). And lack of indirect hard currency rewards (free hard currency boosters, etc.) except the start bonus (30 coins), and Facebook connection gift (20 coins). Mystery Match try to keep hard currency as tight as possible and with the help of early grinding, and it has absolutely shorter game sessions than Farm Heroes Saga. It depends on a shorter but easy to analyse first session, while Farm Heroes Saga blasts a long and hard to analyse first session (as I’ll discuss it on Key Factors for Retention section.)

With the availability of soft currency, Farm Heroes Saga introduces a major grabber called “Companions”. In each episode, a companion level is placed and player can earn up to three companions in each episode. Player can choose only one companion booster that consumes a small amount of soft currency at each level and it is automatically activated during the game play. It is slightly different than other boosters which could not be used multiple times in a level and consume a lower amount of soft currency than other boosters. This micro management provides a better non-paying user retention (that is always needed for social/viral impact on freemium casual games) and lower the inflation of soft currency.

Another difference between Mystery Match and Farm Heroes Saga is the episode unlock economy. While both games prefer social unlock requests as a second option, first option greatly differs. Farm Heroes Saga prefers adding another complexity layer by a boss fight level on each episode to unlock the next episode (Next episode is unlocked if the boss fight level has been completed with 2 star rating, and 1 star rating provides the second social option). In contrast with Farm Heroes Saga, Mystery Match prefers to add a long timer (called traveling) between the episodes. Player could just wait for the timer or choose the second social option to unlock the next episode. This is a much simpler method compared to boss fight levels of Farm Heroes Saga.

Last small difference between two games lies behind social/viral economy variables. Both games let the players to send/receive life and to ask help for unlocking the next episode from their Facebook friends. But, while Farm Heroes Saga rewards players with game currency and various boosters for inviting friends over Facebook, Mystery Match avoids/miss this feature.

Economy Parameters

User Interfaces

Both charts above explain the differences between two games’ interaction models:

• UI Complexity: Farm Heroes Saga needs more panels and even more functions in each panel than Mystery Match.

• Panel Styles: While both games mostly use popup panels over three screens (main menu screen, map screen, game screen), Farm Heroes Saga uses left slide for settings panels and bottom slide for use booster panel, and Mystery Match uses minimal radial menus at bottom left of the screen.

• Social panels: Both games use similar panels for sending lives, asking help for content gates, inboxes etc. While disconnected, both games insist to replace a Facebook connect button on each panel. Mystery Match insist more by even placing a connect button on the inbox, while Farm Heroes Saga misses it. Also, Mystery Match places a share function on success level panel and content gate unlocked panel.

• Reminder panels: Farm Heroes Saga uses reminder panels (such as rate game, invite friends, send lives or cross promotion panels) while opening the map screen and employs them in a strategic way. It opens the “rate game” or “invite friends” panel while only in transition from level success panel to catch player in a better mood, and crosses promotion panel while only in transition from level failed panel. On the other hand, Mystery Match avoids frustrating the player using as minimum reminders as possible.

User Experience

Both games have intuitive, user-friendly and enjoyable interactions. They both focused on usability, and try to show minimal information on the screen at each phase. They both try to mimic the UI/UX designs of the previous famous match-3 genre games.

Both games use portrait orientation over mobile screens and landscape orientation on the web. Portrait orientation is a better preference on casual mobile games because, portrait orientation ergonomically allows one hand free usage. Both games can be played single handed (one hand free) and they don’t need any timing or other reflex factors.

For iPads (tablets), Farm Heroes Saga provides an additional landscape orientation option (which makes sense that one hand free ergonomy doesn’t apply to tablets) while Mystery Match can’t provide this feature.

Mystery Match has a minor detail while exiting the game. If player wants to leave before making any move, game doesn’t use a life. Farm Heroes Saga always use a life on exit. It also would be an evaluated choice to prevent free-randomization of the start board.

A small but vital detail: Farm Heroes Saga has a cute map and match tiles, and it employs cute animations both on the map and on the match tiles. Since animations increase workload (and the needed space), animations only exist on the first 5 episodes of the map. Mystery Match has a detailed stylistic map and match tiles, while all of them are static. (Only match tiles have reflections to give hints)

Narratology

Farm Heroes Saga has a limited story, which is very minimalistic and used for patching the game theme together. There is no motivation given to the player to dig the story in depth.

The narrative is a major grabber in Mystery Match. It combines story elements with the core game design and try to feature the core match-3 structure as a diegetic element. Story involves a private inspector woman with a rich family as protagonist, her sidekick (and secret lover), her father and some other side characters. Story starts with a robbery in their family mansion; robbers have left clues of jeweled puzzle boxes behind. So protagonist try to reveal this mystery by traveling around the world and by solving the match-3 puzzles. This narrative idea allures players over the first sessions but in the long term, the mystery script involving lots of match-3 puzzles and narrated only via static character images with very short dialogues / monologue in between puzzles becomes a hard task to accomplish.

Tile Matching

In Farm Heroes Saga, matching three or more standard tiles removes the matched tiles from the board and apply gravity to drop tiles over empty grids while sending new tiles above the board. Also each perfect match increases the power of surrounding (goal only) tiles. Chain matches and complex matches increase the powers more. These additional powers are temporary for a single move. After a move, all additional tile powers reset to zero. A complex 5 tiled match removes all matched colors from the board.

On Mystery Match, matching three standard tiles removes the matched tiles from the board and apply gravity to drop tiles over empty grids while sending new tiles above the board. Complex matches done with more than three tiles does not simply remove tiles but combine them into a charged tile of the same color. Any extended matches with these charged tile triggers the side effects of the charge. Also swapping two charged tiles trigger larger side effects.

Boosters

Both games’ Boosters don’t consume any moves. They could be used before starting a level or could be used by selecting a target tile to use a booster.

Level Goals

Farm Heroes Saga gives only one goal of collect target amount of tiles of each type. Even boss fights only elegantly twist this goal to collect target amount of tiles of given types in sum. New tile types and properties introduced later would help or burden the player to achieve these goals. On each level, player has limited number of moves and each successful match consume a move. Farm Heroes Saga uses the target goal percentage for scoring player high scores and for giving star ranks up to three. Minimum score for the first star rank is always 100% and other two ranks needs various percentage scores on each level.

On the other hand, Mystery Match gives one of this five goals (remove dark squares, collect given gem colors, drop the symbols, remove the locks, remove the blockers) on each level. New tile types and properties introduced later would help or burden the player to achieve these goals. On each level, player has limited moves and each successful match consume a move. Mystery Match uses an abstract scoring system for player high scores and for giving star ranks. Completing level goals isn’t enough to complete the level but player needs a minimum score for the first star rank and other two ranks needs various scores on each level.

Hint System and Shuffle

For both games, when player wait without making a match in an expected time, a small/fast hint is given for a valid match option. Farm Heroes Saga animates a jump on the tiles while Mystery Match highlights the valid gems. This hint always shows the match option with the lowest tile count. If there is not any available move, then a shuffle happens on the board. Both games shuffle only standard tiles. Other tiles remain the same.

Level Ending

Game ending differs when goals are reached on both games. Farm Heroes Saga introduces the “Hero Mode” when goals are met, and that increases goal tiles’ power over the time and keeps the powers on each turn so the power values could be stacked.

Difficulty Curve and Grinding

The chart above illustrates the difficulty curve of user experience on first 51 levels of Farm Heroes Saga. It is clearly seen that Farm Heroes Saga has a nearly flat difficulty curve and it tries to avoid early grinding. That allows player a very short to very long early sessions. Since a very long first session provides a better adaptation to game, it is risky to lose control over when user will leave the first session. I discussed that problem in depth on Key Factors For Retention section.

In Farm Heroes Saga, even there are two companion levels before (on level 7 and 18), companion powers unlocks only after 28.th level (because it would increase the complexity more if it was introduced before). The Companions related UI is exposed (not hidden from the beginning) before introducing the Companion Boosters, because, Companions is the grabber feature of Farm Heroes Saga. Third companion level is at level 38 and the third one is the first not-easy companion level. This level is the first level that have replay value because farm club panel rewards every 3 pairs of companions at the same tier and, without unlocking 3.rd tier companion (by earning 3 stars), the 3.rd reward is not available.

Also, on Farm Heroes Saga, there are two easy rancid levels (boss fight) before (on level 10 and 21), and third rancid level (on level 33) introduces content gates. Content gates (named as Unlock Episode) in Farm Heroes Saga is not a hard challenge on early sessions. Starting from the first content gate after level 40 to last gate I unlocked after level 100 they were effortlessly unlocked after winning the rancid levels by 2 stars ranking or more. Rancid levels also have absolute replay value if only passed by 1 star ranking. First 2 content gates after level 16 and 26 are removed from Farm Heroes Saga. Map design (bridges between themes) obviously points there were content gates after these levels. Also all other episodes are 10-15 levels long that would point out the same theory. The first two content gates possibly removed to simplify the complexity for early sessions.

The chart above illustrates the difficulty curve of user experience on first 51 levels of Mystery Match. After a fast paced 10 levels, Mystery Match ends first episode and asks the player to unlock the next episode by paying hard currency or by just waiting (player must even wait by using social requests, three requests needs to be answered.) Possibly, most of the players would skip this content gate by paying hard currency (since they can’t make an accurate evaluation about the hard currency yet) so at Level 12, a very hard level design awaits players to spend all their gifted hard currency or an absolute end for first session. For second session, Mystery Match offers a full set of medium / hard levels that ends with a second content gate, which forces the player to wait for the first time. After forcing players with short-medium session lengths by very hard puzzles that require almost all 5 lives to complete (expected gameplay is possibly by using previous 3 free boosters to pass these levels), with an extremely difficult 46.th level, Mystery Match first time checks for the early pay users.

So, Mystery Match chooses to grind players at the very early stages of the game. It makes full sense for a game that skips layered economy loop and introduces minimal features.

Pacing

Both games build their core loops for a very slow paced game design. On the game board, both games do not allow player to make any asynchronous move while the chain match reactions are happening. All UX are designed for a reflex free structure to notify user that, they could act anytime they want. This is also the major factor that moved match-3 games to an epic popularity.

After level 51, Mystery Match begins to use time challenges (instead of move counts) in some levels. This is a bad combination for game experience, because the core game loop is organized for reflex free gameplay. Farm Heroes Saga also repeats the same mistake in a holiday challenge I’ve encountered. The challenge was completing 5 levels in a very limited time. This small challenge brings the same problem of not fitting the core game loop.

Viral / Social Interaction

Both Farm Heroes Saga and Mystery Match use standard techniques when it comes to social interaction: “Invite Friends”, “Send Lives” and “Ask Help From Friends” on the content gates. Also both games interact with players on their respective Facebook page, and try to create a community.

Mystery Match have Share Button after each successful level and after unlocking each episode (content gates). Farm Heroes Saga don’t use any sharing methodology. (It could be taken as a nice hint about player behaviours from the sector lead King)

Key Factors For Retention

Farm Heroes Saga has three back to action calls:

• Call to action for a refreshed set of lives after approx. 1 hour (Up to 5 lives and 15 minutes for each life)

• Call to action for a weekly events and challenges (like Chasing The Sun challenge)

• Call to action for holiday events and challenges (with soft and hard currency rewards)

Mystery Match also has two back to action calls:

• Call to action for a refreshed set of lives after approx. 2 hours (Up to 5 lives and 30 minutes for each life)

• Call to action for opening a content gate (unlock episode) after 48 hours

These two calls could be missed if a player leaves the last session without using any lives and if this player still has not reached to a content gate. So, a third effective call is vital, and it is fully missed in Mystery Match (yes it possibly has “We missed you” call, but it is not effective)

First idea for a solution would be offering hard currency over time to call back, yet as I mentioned on Difficulty Curve and Grinding Section, a player who left the game in very early sessions can’t make an accurate evaluation about the hard currency yet, so a currency reward would not be a promising reason for calling them back and even it would possibly hurt the monetization.

Appendix

I’ve played Farm Heroes Saga up to level 102 and Mystery Match up to level 52 before writing this comparison. I tested them both on Android Phone, on iPad, on Facebook and on King Website.

Also, here are some related articles I’ve examined during or before the comparison:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DylanJones/20151208/261210/Currencies_in_game_economy_loops.php

http://www.lostgarden.com/2012/04/loops-and-arcs.html

http://www.deconstructoroffun.com/2013/07/6-reasons-why-pet-rescue-saga-isnt-next.html

http://www.deconstructoroffun.com/p/mid-core-success-series.html

http://civax.net/2013/10/the-saga-framework-part-1-game-flow/

http://civax.net/2013/11/the-saga-framework-part-2-social-layer-monetization/

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/194933/

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130516/192386/Systems_of_Control_in_F2P.php

http://www.gamesbrief.com/2011/11/retention-rate-churn-and-duration/

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JunxueLi/20150924/254460/The_Maps_of_Mystery_Match_Rich_and_classic.php

http://elite.nad.ca/en/interview-with-kings-tristan-clark/

Endless Runners: Procedural Map Generation And Difficulty Curves

Procedural Map Generation with Minorly Varying Constant Map Parts

Procedural level design does not mean that these levels should be randomly ordered. For endless runner games, pattern recognition has a big role. Player learns how to recognize the action patterns and how to operate the moves to complete these patterns. Most of game design failures in this genre is related to the lack of pattern recognition consistency, or to the lack of minor variations.

The best example in this regard is without doubt the two layered procedural design of Subway Surfers. The visual layout outside of the actual game field is ordered in a different layer. This visual layer merge with the game field layer in bonus parts hidden in upper installations and through the tunnels that sometimes connect different game-field subsections. These subsections offer a quickly recognized game experience while preventing repetitiveness via small variations.

Did you know that: In Subway Surfers, in order to avoid overloading of physics engine, the trains that move towards the player place their bounding box statically at the point of contact, depending on the game’s speed at that instant. Therefore, even if they move visually, theoretically, they constitute static obstacles like other obstacles in the game.

The balance between the randomness and pattern recognition should be carefully/masterfully built/crafted in our project. Within “Buddies: Dash In Time”, there are several stages that are divided in parts such as Farms, City, Fortress, Arena, Market Places etc. Each of these parts are composed of 6-8 subsections that can also contain minor variations. The player, in order to pass to the next stage, should traverse through 16-32 subsections: this means that each subsection repeats 2 or 3 times during the game. Each stage aims to be memorised(?) by specific visual aesthetics and color coding. During the first sessions, the player will experience only two of these stages. Other stages will be unlocked sequentially once the player completes missions and levels up. This sequential progression is important in building a joyful ride for the beginners, and bringing new challenges to more advanced players, and thus, completing an easy-to-learn-hard-to-master game design.

Another factor that should be taken in consideration for procedurally generated stages is to design them with a speed-proof approach. Because they will be ordered in a random fashion, each stage should offer experiences conforming to the minimum, average and maximum game speed with an increasing, but not impossible level of difficulty.

Difficulty Curve for Jumping

Changing the difficulty of procedurally generated maps with minor variants is critically important.

Beyond classical reflex timing challenges, which is common for all endless runners, Subway Surfers have a very significant success in creatively managing the difficulty curves with “Air Control Mastery”. The game tutorial does not reveal that there is a chance of air control (runner instantly dive to ground if the player swipe down while on air) and none of the obstacles is designed to require that skill during the low speed runs. After a while, run speed increases to a specific range and few obstacle designs (which are already used regularly on low speeds) begin to require the air control skill to be discovered for longer runs. At the maximum speed, the air control becomes an important part of the game, which is used almost in each second of the run, and player need to master this action to survive. This excellent trick converts the gameplay to an easy-to-learn-hard-to-master experience, which can be taken as example for our project.

The secret paths that will be used in “Buddies: Dash In Time” are good instances where the experience of air control mastery can be used and be expanded.

By using the catapults in the game, the player can make longer and higher jumps (that can be continued only in the middle lane). This allows to win bonus gold during the fly and a power-up at the end. To connect two stages, we use the same catapult. Catapult throws protagonist over the castle walls and continue the run over there. During the long-jump experience, the camera targets a higher point of normal view in order to reveal the target location better, and when the protagonist hits the peak, it starts to focus down in order to show the ground, and therefore, to let the player avoid any obstacle that might be on the track that is about to be landed on. During the first part of this jump-journey where the main focus is to collect gold coins, the player does not perceive what is left down the road: it is rather a lucrative and calm ascent. The secret path design above was built to be discovered at this very moment when a player chooses to descend from the jump.

What do you think? Would that work?