Dragon’s Loot
Summary
Dragon’s Loot is a mobile match 3 game where the players defeat dragons by making Poker Hands. The game is played on a board of varying sizes. On the board, there are tiles that represent one of the 52 cards present in a playing card deck. The player matches cards of 5 by sliding their fingers to create poker hands. After, the hands are evaluated according according to rarity, and score is converted into damage. Decrease the Dragon’s health to 0 before using up all your moves to win the levels.
Project Type: Professional Experience
Role: Lead Game Designer
Timeline: July - December 2022
Initial Design
Design Problem: I was tasked with creating the main gameplay loop of Dragon’s Loot, which was based off of a previous prototype made by Mafia Games. The prototype was a web based multiplayer poker hand matching game where the players were competing against each other. It had dragons but they did not play a major role in the game yet. I was asked to create an engaging single player casual mobile experience that integrated making Poker Hands.
Solution: I was inspired by match 3 games and their level progression. I converted objectives into score and themed it as dragon health. The variety of gameplay would be provided by the different types of dragons and their abilities to influence the board. I started off by creating a Game Design Document using confluence, which you can find the early version of the document to the side.
One of the challenges with Poker Hands was that at any time there could not be any duplicate tiles/cards on the board. Earlier versions of the game used packs of cards as moves, which led to the board being empty in around 9 moves. In playtests, we also saw that this was confusing to our players so we converted it into moves, like other match 3 games.
Dragon’t Loot also has a meta game, where at the end of each level, the player gains dragon hearths, which could be used to furnish different island, which were viking themed.
Initial Game Design Document
Level Design
After the main gameplay loop, I worked on other aspects of the user experience such as level design and tutorials.
Tutorials: Using google documents I created a script for the tutorial. Then, I used Miro to make storyboard wireframes that illustrated how the tutorial would be relayed to the player. My mockups were then used by the engineers to implement these changes.
Level Design: I created 100 levels for the initial launch and I used Google Sheets to balance level difficulty. Dragon’s Loot follows a difficulty curve that repeats every 10 levels, where there is at least 1 medium and 1 hard level.
Level Design Problem: At Mafia Games, I was the only designer working on Dragon’s Loot, so unlike other casual puzzle games, we did not have the manpower to release with over 5000 levels. We were afraid that this would decrease retention, as we would not have enough content to satisfy players and create returning users.
Level Design Solution: I created an algorithm to randomly generate levels. Each level had to have a board shape, a dragon type, difficulty that determined the dragons health, and the amount of moves the player had. These attributes had a difficulty multiplier that would determine the overall difficulty of levels. From this data, attributes would be mixed together to create random levels.
Mockups in Miro of Pop Ups
After Release
Problem: After releasing Dragon’s Loot, we realized that our retention rate was less then 30%, which was below our expectations for the game. We were tracking the data using Google Analytics, and we realized that a lot of our players would play for about 5 minutes before closing the app and never returning back.
Solution: I went back into the tutorial and decreased the amount of tutorial pop ups that would be added. I also redesigned the first 10 levels to include more variety and to be able to showcase more of our mechanics.
We also wanted to create more meta gameplay in the form of events, so I worked on a battle pass model and challenges inspired by Book of Treasure from Royal Match.
Mockups in Miro for new game mechanics