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Match in Paris was a match three game with a strong metagame about rebuilding a hotel in Paris and engaging with a soap opera like strong narrative, supported by great cut-scenes. The action phase was a casual match three core game, fast-paced and centred in the fun factor.
I worked in this game from August 2022 until the end of that year. This was the first professional project that I worked in, and it allowed me to start having a picture of what the game industry was like and how the production of games worked. Also, I started to grow as a game and level designer, learning from a great team.
Platform: iOS/Android
Studio: Socialpoint, T2, Zynga
Role: Level Designer
My role in this project was working as a Level Designer. On this game my main purpose was to create M3 levels, but I also helped designing mechanics and some features that were level related.
This game was a soft-launched game, so it was not live. That gave me more time to learn and practice, and I was able to understand the fundamentals of a match 3.
Being involved in an amazing team and having great mentors made my first professional project super smooth and enjoyable. I had really knowledgeable figures to learn from, and that always encouraged curiosity and creativity. Because of that, I keep carrying those values until today.
The levels of Match in Paris were very smooth to play, the UX was very polished and was a very reactive game.
Designing levels for it implied thinking of choosing the proper mechanics to match the difficulty, while keeping variety for the players.
Learning to design aiming to our target audience was key.
Also, I was part of the development of a couple of mechanics, that was a process where I could apply a lot of game design concepts that I learned on my university degree.
One of the features that I was involved was the creation and addition of Win Streak Breakers (WSB) to the game.
Designing WSB was a challenge, the goal was to create levels that had the same difficulty for a person that was playing without Win Streak (WS) and for a person that had WS. After several proposals and some testing, we gathered enough insights to come with different techniques to create levels that broke the WS to the player.
Summarizing those, we used: Specific mechanics that blocked the effects of the WS, we started creating levels with a closed start that diminished the usefulness of the WS boosters, we played with initial chip layouts that broke if the player entered with WS, ...
Adding this new type of levels to the 1000 existing levels was not trivial, so we had to analyse the player behaviour, having in mind the duration of the WS, the tiers of those, and then decide the frequency of the WSB levels.
Being involved in that kind of developments also taught me about the importance of testing things with AB Tests and analysing data from players.
This project also taught me a lot of how a production of a commercial game with a team of more than 30 people worked and how to communicate, plan, and work with other departments.
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