Tap Jam (2024)

Lion Studios

My Role:

Game Designer, Level Designer

In Tap Jam, my core responsibilities were designing the core game mechanics and the level and puzzle design.

Due to our team size, I worked closely with the Project Manager and helped lead the project from pre-production to market test. Additionally, I utilized my past QA experience to vet and report any bugs discovered in the testing process.

During the project’s development, my main notable contributions were:

  • Create the layout and simulate the gameplay step by step to tweak the puzzle’s solution and iterate as I went along without engineering support.

  • Hand-code the majority of the puzzle levels (~50 levels) utilizing a JSON script which was imported into Unity. This was due to the lean nature of the game’s development cycle and the fact we did not create a level editor tool initially.

  • Define and provide team support on the UX and functionality of the puzzle mechanics for the game’s unique mechanics (Mystery Tiles, Tile Spawners, Special Shaped Tiles, Jelly Tiles, and Frozen Tiles), ensuring that each mechanic had a unique look and feel, and communicated its functionality in a clear way.

  • Ensure that the game’s UX felt smooth and satisfying by having animations sped up and utilizing snappy sounds based on feedback from internal and external testing.

  • Analyze player progression and adjust game levels where there was a significant drop-off or unintended rise in level fail rates.

Showcase of gameplay and level design

Project Process & Breakdown

Pre-Production:
The goal of Tap Jam was to create a low-cost game with good early player retention, session lengths, a low cost-per-install rate (CPI), and a project that had a fitting scope for our small team and our expertise in casual game development.

The PM and I looked at similar hyper-casual puzzle games such as Unpuzzle, Screw Jam, and Coin Match 3D as they fit the scope and KPIs we sought. I found that each of the games had a few key features for success, which I then translated into our core game design pillars:

  • Easy-to-understand core loop

    • The core loop has to be understood almost immediately with very brief tutorials to get players going.

  • Snappy and satisfying UX

    • The gameplay needs to have a tactile feel to it through UX, sound and pacing. Each move should feel satisfying to make and quick enough that players can make consecutive moves in a rapid fashion without any delays.

  • Tension and release pacing

    • The game should have moments where the player is almost out of options, and where a single move creates exciting chain reactions into a satisfying conclusion.

I conveyed these pillars to the team, and since this was a market test, no level editor was created. Our first milestone was creating a handful of easy, medium, and hard levels that demonstrated the basic gameplay, and a method for me to design these levels. I hand-coded the levels utilizing a JSON script which we fed into Firebase, which was our server-based software that let us make changes without requiring new builds.

Demonstration of the game’s satisfying and snappy feedback when playing.

Early look and feel:
I did not have prior experience with designing levels for a slide puzzle before, so I had to establish a workflow that allowed me to design solvable levels, and gauge the challenge rating before implementing levels into the game. For this, I used Google Slides, as it is my go-to for quick mockups. I created a “tile palette” and a grid system serving as a template for each level. This way I, or anyone who wanted to participate in level creation, could easily copy-paste from the palette into the grid, and quickly see the design restrictions.

I would often start with a single concept, such as “I want to teach players that they can move tiles into other tiles”, “I want to introduce a new mechanic and force players to observe or interact with it”, or “I want a level to look intimidating, but in reality is really easy and almost impossible to fail (Only very perceptive players would catch on to this)”. I would create a first draft, then solve it move-by-move in Google Slides to emulate the gameplay. This proved very effective and allowed me to vet levels with the team before implementing them into the game.

Example of a level mocked up in Google Slides and the final result in-game (Click to open a larger version)

Old tile design. These are still visible on the game’s page

Changing the tile design:
We initially used colored tiles with white arrows, which allowed for the creation of pixel art puzzles, but it affected the game’s readability with future game mechanics. We switched to white tiles with color arrows, and this allowed for seamless game readability when special tiles were introduced in later levels.

The PM and I discussed and agreed that introducing mechanics early was important to:

  1. Demonstrate to players that the game experience is ever-evolving, and

  2. Communicate that there are new surprises around every corner if they keep playing.

In addition, I designed the UX to display the remaining levels required to beat before the next game mechanic is unlocked. My hypothesis was that this helped increase player session length and retention.

On level clear, we show how many levels are left until a new feature unlocks.

Level Mechanics:
For the market test, we had five new level mechanics we introduced over the game’s initial content: Mystery Tiles, Spawner Tiles, Special Shape Tiles, Ice Tiles, and Jelly Tiles. It was important to me that each new mechanic felt unique from the previous and could be used in tandem or combined with all other mechanics. I approached each mechanic like the level tools found in the Mario Maker games, where they could stand on their own feet, but if combined with another, it would create a wonderful synergy. With that in mind, each mechanic could in theory be layered on each other (i.e. a Freeze Tile could reveal a Mystery Tile when melted, or a Jelly Tile could hide a Special Shape when all the jelly was removed).

Final tile design and various special tiles that are unlocked in later levels

User Testing:
We conducted external user testing, which verified that almost every player fully understood the gameplay mechanics and dynamics 3 to 4 levels into the game. I keep the “goodwill” system from Steve Krug’s book, “Don’t Make Me Think” in mind when gauging a player’s retention and stickiness.

In his book, Krug views patience as a resource that can be depleted and refilled through various actions and gestures when a user interacts with your designs. But once the goodwill is spent, the user will leave, and most likely never return. My goal was to ensure the first 5 levels were impossible to fail to guarantee players had time to get invested in the game before throwing any real challenge at them and ensure that there was no early game friction. I designed some levels to look challenging, but in reality, there was very little chance for danger.

Additionally, I made sure that even difficult levels that utilized spawners and mystery tiles were not difficult due to players having to guess the right move. Some of the titles I researched had this, and it never felt fair or fun when I failed a level because I happen to pick the wrong move in a 50/50 scenario. Therefore, even when players had to make a guess, the guess should not cause a fail state, but instead up the importance of the player’s next move and they were forced to make another risk assessment. If a player failed a level, it should always be apparent to players what caused the failure and how to correct it next time.

Takeaways:

The team was able to successfully prototype Tap Jam and create an engaging and innovative puzzle game in three months. We had plans in place to further develop daily reward systems, add more player boosts, and utilize more of the game’s softcurrency after initial market testing, but unfortunately, Lion Studios chose not to continue developing Tap Jam after only one week of market testing.

Even so, I am ultimately proud of the work I and the team put into the game and the experience gained along the way. In the pre-production phase, I discovered and improved on elements that hook players in some of the most successful casual games out there. During the level design phase, I developed an effective workflow with the limitations we had for creating complex puzzles for a genre I had not worked in before, and I further developed my skills in puzzle design specifically.

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