Professional game development team (Wooga GmbH), Unity, October 2017 - April 22
Bubble Island 2 is no longer available for download
The first project I worked on at Wooga was Bubble Island 2; a bubble shooter puzzle game. The game was a casual puzzle game designed around shot calculation and physics. Players would have to accomplish various objectives by shooting fruit around a board, bouncing the fruit off of different objects and angles to achieve their goals in the set amount of moves. The levels were made of the same fruit that players were shooting. Every time three or more fruit collided, they would be removed from the board. The game was unique in its use of physics; as many objects in the levels had mass and momentum and would affect the objects around them instead.
As this was my first job with Wooga (and my first post-graduation game designer job), a large portion of my time on the project was devoted to content production: making, reviewing, and polishing levels and level features. My primary, continuous task was to as many levels as I could to meet our scheduled releases and keep our players engaged.
When I first started out at Wooga, I focused on making my levels very "puzzly"; requiring careful thought and precise aiming to make beat. These levels made use of the in-game physics and often relied on bouncing shots off of the board edges and level objects to make efficient matches. The idea of these levels were to play up the physics of our game and the problem solving of the puzzle genre.
However, as I became more familiar with BI2's gameplay flow and our audience's preferences, I began to change my design approach. My later levels tended to be less challenging and more focused on creating satisfying feedback and visuals. These newer levels still made use of the game's physics, but much more to the effect of creating large chain reactions that would impress players and give them a greater feeling of achievement and impact.
In addition to creating levels, I would also assist with or oversee the implementation of new gameplay elements that players would engage with while playing our levels. One of these was the Rotating Hinge, a level object that I conceptualized and integrated into the game. The object was a hinge (a point in the game that anchored the level's environment together) that would rotate by a set amount each time the player fired a fruit.
This object was designed to double down on the game's physics feature and create dynamic levels. Depending on the layout of the level, these Rotating Hinges could create large changes in the environment. Rotations could block or open shots, constrict or slacken loosely-linked level chains, and create auto-matches that would remove sections of the environment.
