Hello everyone, from the Merge Villa development team!
Today we will tell you how our team developed a Tile Trials feature.
We will tell you the main ideas we pursued during development and the problems we faced.If you haven’t had time to play our feature yet, here’s what it’s about:
Tile Trials is an event with a certain number of tasks the player can complete during the game and receive a reward.
Stage 1: “Challenges are cool!”
The task before us was to make it so that during the game, the player had the opportunity not only to perform the main tasks and progress through the plot but also to receive interesting challenges for performing various activities in the game.
In this way, the main idea of the future feature was formed:
The player plays the game -> the player uses different aspects of the match -> the player gets a reward for actively using the activities -> the player receives new challenges every time.
At the same stage, the first “rough” models of the future feature began to appear.
As a basis for creating challenges, we decided to take various activities and divide them into:
1) Activities that the player does intuitively and constantly (for example, flashing objects or spending energy)
2) Activities that the player sometimes performs but without a clear need (for example, spending coins/crystals or using boosters)
3) Activities that the player performs only if he has played the game for a long enough time and he plays actively (Burn the trinkets with items or buy decor in his villa)
This approach allowed us to understand exactly what challenges we wanted to see in the feature much faster.
Stage 2: “Too difficult challenges are not cool”
The next stage: To ensure that the player, regardless of his level or experience in the game, does not feel that the challenge turns into a routine process and no longer brings pleasure.
To do this, the team of game designers began the process of dividing future tasks into categories by complexity and number.
The main goal is not to scare the player with many tasks at the start and gradually increase their number. At the same time, they are progressively expanding the difficulty of the challenges.
There were challenges in terms of complexity divided into:
1) Simple
2) Average
3) Complex
4) Super Complex
According to the number of challenges a player can perform simultaneously, we divided them into ten types.
The player will receive 4 to 6 tasks at the beginning of the feature. Later, this indicator will increase to 12 tasks simultaneously.
The more the player closes the tasks, the more difficult they will be in the future.
It was essential to maintain a balance of easy-medium-difficult challenges that the player received at the same time.
Thus, the optimal balance between the complexity of the challenges and their number was found through the method of painstaking work and many hours of discussions.
Stage 3: “An understandable feature – an interesting feature”
The visual comprehensibility of the feature is a key part of which it was special attention is paid.
Task tiles should comprehensively describe precisely what the player needs to do.
And to make the feature less visually monotonous, it was decided to create different figures from the “tiles” of the tasks each time.
This is how it looked on the layouts, and finally, in the game:
Result
Of course, there are still a lot of steps to be taken before the Tile Trials feature is finished, but even now, the work is not stopped.
Our team is working to ensure that this feature and many others provide exactly the experience for the player that he hopes to get.
Best wishes, Merge Villa developers!
Until We Meet Again!
