Sebastian Madsen

After a basic shape has been found for the layout, comes the gameplay. The player should experience varied gameplay in the level and shouldn’t feel that it is monotonous and a hassle to play.

An easy way to make a level hard is obviously to just make each blocker have more layers. But then the player can barely feel that they are making any progress and they might start to mindlessly match without any planning.

Start a level with blockers with lower layers and then ramp them up as the player progresses. Assisting the player with spawning specials in the level also varies up the gameplay and can help guide the player within the level.

I often use special spawners as a reward for progressing, like in the Soda Bear-level posted next to this paragraph. When the player clears the blockers to the right, they open up a spawner that gives the player fish-specials.

Sometimes we run tweaking projects that can have specific goals in mind, such as shortening the playtime of levels that take a long time to play through. Being able to easily read and understand the data is a must to run a successful project. During a project such as that, more drastic tweaking is necessary, for example if a level is 4 screens we know that it takes too long to play and we need to have it be at only 2 screens instead. Keeping the difficulty while also cutting the amount of screens in half would be impossible without more drastic changes to the level.

My first big project that I was the leading designer on was the The Shuffler. I worked closely with the programmers and the UX-designer to make this booster valuable to the players.

What it does is that once activated it shuffles the regular candies on the game board and gives the player a special candy as well, that way it was always a win. Other games that utilise a similar booster only shuffles the board, but we wanted it to leave less up to chance, and with gifting a special candy, it was always a win for the player!

When a new element wasn’t being developed, I designed pitches for new features and worked on optimisation projects, helping the team responsible for the saga. My main tasks were to create new levels for the end of content team, but I was always willing to assist the Soda team whenever I was needed.

Another project I can talk about is Sweet Escape, a new game mode! The goal of this mode is to clear the path for the Soda Bear, so he can get to the end portal. I worked closely with the game designer of this mode to create a cohesive experience for the players. Since it’s quite different from the other modes we have, the readability and on-boarding for the players was very important. The mode was warmly received by our players, who loved the fresh take on Soda, which motivated us to use the bear more as a mascot for the entire game!

One problem our End of Content players face each week is that they run our of levels. These players love the game, so every release day, they finish all the levels in one sitting but as a result they don’t have much left to do in the game. So how would one fix this? With the Door! This door opens when the player has finished the last released level. Here they can play an endless amount of levels! But how does it work? With the help of the data board previously mentioned, I tracked well received levels and added them to a table. These levels are then randomised, with certain criteria, for the players to play! So yes, it isn’t actually endless, but the pool of levels is gigantic and it doesn’t end. The Door solved one of the biggest grievances our End of Content players have each week and it was great to read about the positive impact it had on our player base when it was released!

There are a couple of elements that I believe are the most important when designing a level for Candy Crush Soda Saga.

When a player opens a level they should like be able to easily read the level and not feel immediately overwhelmed. Making a level that has a nice shape is an important way to avoid this.

People are wired to like looking at shapes and find patterns in the things we look at. As long as the level isn’t too busy in its design, then its layout can even be asymmetrical. Although it is easier to make a level that is easy to read if it is symmetrical.

Tweaking and analyzing data

Soda has came out in 2014 and with each year things in the game change. As designers we get better and better at building levels and new people join with new learnings. Because of this, earlier levels might use old conventions that we’ve moved away from. This requires us to always analyze the data that we get from the players and tweak look into how we can improve older levels. We obviously want all players to enjoy our game, no matter where they are in the progression.

We don’t want to drastically rework levels unless necessary, because we want to respect the old designer’s idea. The game should still get harder and harder the further along in the game they are. Some blockers come later in the game, so we need to use what’s available at that stage of the progression. In our day-to-day work in regards to tweaking we mostly change parameters of blockers and specials within the level, as well as the amount of moves available to the player.

Refreshing the game with new projects

As I grew in seniority I took on more responsibilities at Soda. I tried to be a part of every project going on within the team. The first project I worked on was remaking Chocolate Game Mode levels into the updated version of the mode. The goal in this mode is to remove all the Chocolate from the board. Each round the chocolate isn’t damaged, it grows one tile. The issue was that it easily got out of control and led to more and more negative progression. In the new mode the chocolate was restricted to only grow within their designated area called “Trays”, shown as light brown background. When all the chocolate in an area was cleared, the trays were removed. I remade many of these old chocolate levels, trying to keep the original idea of the level in mind, but when the design didn’t work well for the new mode, I remade the level from scratch.

Leading the End of Content team

I’ve always enjoyed teaching and mentoring. I grew up with two younger sisters and I’ve worked as a kindergarten teaching, so it has always come natural to me. This passion was something I wanted to pursue at King as well, so I mentored two new joiners during my time there. I believe it’s important to realise that everyone learns best in different ways. Some want concrete tasks to follow, while others learn better in a in a looser way. I discussed with my new joiners how they best learn and modified their tasks accordingly.

I also started to host Design Talks, where I did presentations regarding different design philosophies and I became known as a great presenter, being the go-to person to ask if we were tasked with making a presentation.

All this work resulted in me leading the End of Content Team. Together with our producer, I worked on ways to improve our pipeline. With the help from our programmers, I improved the work flow of many processes in our day-to-day work. Many of these systems I worked on were very old, having been developed when Soda was first created back in 2014. With our work, the time shaved off in total was estimated to be 10 hours per week!

I also worked with my producer together with a team to create a board to track different data. Together with a data scientist and UX-designers. I obviously can’t go into specifics about this, but it’s now a part of the weekly workflow and used to track specific data.