Drop colored balls from a moving rope into columns to complete level conditions.
My role
Systems architecture and gameplay programming, tooling and pipeline design, level generation and balancing, UI and gameplay animation systems.
The interesting part: 200+ levels without handcrafting them
Handcrafting 200 levels is not a content problem, it is a time problem. So the levels are parameterized and generated from config data instead. Designers rebalance by changing numbers, not by rebuilding scenes.
- Parameterized level generation driven by config data
- Scales to 200+ levels
- Cut level creation and balancing time by roughly 70%
- Controlled randomness, to balance player agency against unpredictability
Reusable systems
- Parameterized level generation driven by config data
- Reusable reward and ad-based helper systems
- Lightweight animation and effects system: ordered execution, skipping, reuse, and it needs no code
- Modular UI windows, tutorial and animation sequence systems
Tradeoff
Config design over handcrafted levels. You give up precise per-level authoring, you get iteration speed and content volume. For a mobile puzzle game that ships updates, it is the right trade.