Design Commentary

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Designing Bubble Shooter game levels requires a lot of testing and fine tuning to create a good level since creating levels for this genre is rather complex than it seems on the surface. A level at first glance can seem like it was randomly generated with no consideration towards the colour matches, but nothing would be further than the truth. Each and every bubble placed in the level is well thought out and intentional. That is because the focus of the designer in making bubble shooter levels is to create paths for players to progress through the level and cleverly hide these paths amongst other misleading options, thus creating a maze for the player to navigate and reach the top while collecting objectives along the way.

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Adding obstacles is another way of increasing the difficulty of the levels, but as a designer you need to be mindful of how many obstacles you are adding. By placing too many obstacles in the level the correct/effective path can easily be revealed in its design and if the obstacles are simply getting in the way of the player traversing that path then it quickly makes the level very frustrating to play. Therefore, too much of any one thing can be very bad for the overall flow in the level. On the other hand if you have very little obstacles and only matches then you are not presenting enough challenge for the player to consider different strategies resulting in a loss of interest from the player.

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A good level will not only have a healthy balance of obstacles to matches, but it will also take into account the colour diversity regarding matches. Increasing the number of match-able colours in the level makes it more challenging as players can only make one coloured match per shot and they are limited in the number of shots per level. If the player receives a colour that is not present in a particular section of the level then the player will feel cheated out of a move since that shot is going to be wasted regardless of what they aim for. To overcome this issue the designer needs to incorporate a proper balance of colours in the various paths so the player always feels like they are progressing in a level.

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Last but not the least, the size of the matches and their orientation in bubble shooter games matters a lot because it controls the pace at which the player progresses. If a level only has multiple horizontal small matches then each shot the player takes will only progress the player up by 1 layer and create very little opening to shoot deeper into the level, thus creating a very slow tedious experience for the players. However, long vertical matches can drastically speed up the rate at which the player reaches the top, since the long matches take up more space and can be removed in a single shot, freeing up more space for easy shots deeper into other sections of the level. Having a solid mix of these in different sections of the level keeps the player in a constant flow of hard and easy sections, creating a more engaging and satisfying progression curve.

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Learning how each of these elements work in correlation with each other comes with experience and it can be quite difficult to grasp how the level will flow in the first iteration. That is why multiple play tests of the level help in identifying issues, to better fine tune the player experience. Furthermore, working on countless levels can be very tiring as each level needs proper care and attention, which is why researching other competitive products can also help the designer derive inspiration for their own concepts. Having a solid grasp of these techniques is what enabled me to create many successful levels for the game which in turn helped maintain the player retention rate and continue generating profit for the studio. This was also recognized by the management and such I was also later tasked with checking the quality of levels from other designers to ensure they understood the creative process that is involved in making successful levels.