Usually, a wavy or sawtooth-type difficulty curve from level to level is approximated for games with "endless" progression and several daily sessions, so you get small progressions of harder and harder levels. Then, the designers tweak them - the infamous Level 65 in the original Candy Crush Saga was nerfed this way - either by changing probabilities of certain pieces spawning, increasing turn allowances, or reducing objective counts. The trick is not to design for a specific difficulty, the trick is to design many levels in one go, and then order them according to apparent difficulty by manual and automated testing and also with data coming from live players. and conversely, for a team it might take a while for them to onboard a new designer onto "their" particular game. So there's a certain job security in being a good Match-3 designer :). Level design takes a certain skill, and new or amateur designers will often try to build "puzzle" levels or gimmick levels, or can't make levels hard enough because they themselves can't play at the needed difficulty level yet. (King published some of this research, you can Google the full docs) Levels of games in that genre are primarily edited by hand, but then extensively categorized, classified and automation tested with heuristic or probabilistic and decision-based testing methods, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search. Making Levels for these games becomes an economy of scale and consistency.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |