Is it possible to create immersive experiences with a tough challenging game?

May 4, 2020

We know that some of you go crazy trying to find the missing pair of our socks… we also know the deep satisfaction of finally finding it. Let's make it a bit more challenging and double every object in your room and then try to match them all. Well, we have just made that a reality, offering you double the satisfaction of pairing.

Our latest game Match 3D offers a unique and challenging puzzle game experience for everyone. All you have to do is match all pairs on the ground by dragging them over the touch screen to the designated area within the given time. This game gives you new cute objects, less time, and more challenging levels as you progress through the game.

How can a person "go crazy" while searching for stuff in real life and enjoy it and have fun doing the same activity in the virtual world under more challenging conditions? Let's examine this together.

1- Gaming Experience

The first point is that this is a "game" and offers an "experience." Since there is a "gap" between gamers and non-gamers in the case of monitoring a game screen, we wanted everyone to be able to clearly "understand what they see in the game." The design of the 3D objects is inspired by people's daily lives, which are simple, global, and recognizable at first sight. After all, who doesn't know a fork or a cute panda?

Besides the eye-candy objects, we do not add any rules except "gravity" and "time" like real life. Players are able to drag any of the objects they choose to any place. In a manner of speaking, this allows the players to dig through the mess in order to find the specific object they are looking for. This is a great feeling of freedom given to the players that we rarely see in the puzzle game genre.

This might seem a bit odd, but Match 3D game has no secondary mechanic, no tutorial, no twist, no achievements; all game features are unlocked by level 25. This makes a considerable difference in gameplay experience since the players do not spend their precious time learning complex dynamics or getting bored through many different tutorial levels. Instead, our users play the game and focus on the only core dynamic, completing the level.

2- Difficulty

Level design is the primary key to success in the puzzle genre, even if you have very few elements to solve. In Match 3D, only two essential factors determine the difficulty; Level Time and the Number of Objects. With these two values, Match 3D is able to generate endless levels. Our test results on level design showed that players do not desire edgy levels in the essence of long-term playtimes. Notions of "easy" or "hard" should not be felt during the game's flow; it should always be within the limit of the player, not the designer. Difficulty should not push players to IAP or hardcore boundaries; controversially, it should be casual, fluid, and passable in a few tries. One last note, since the game is simple and easy to master, the learning curve is unique for Match 3D. This also gives us more chances to get reliable results on our difficult tests.

3- Sense of Achievement

When you complete a level in Match 3D, all you see is an empty gray ground on the screen for a few seconds. When you compare this emptiness with the start of the level, where there are primarily at least 70-80 objects on the ground, it makes you feel like you achieved a lot. You get to clean an entire pile of random crazy objects in less than 3 minutes and enjoy the sense of accomplishment that ensues! The contrast between the start scene and the end scene of the game gives a natural sense of completion, which triggers the sense of achievement without showing any achievement badge on the screen.

We think that if a player can master the game, it should have the option to be competitive, and so we added some events and tournaments where our players can easily sign-up and compete for high scores. Since the events have prizes for top scorers, it significantly impacted team build-ups and the usual speed of leveling up. We believe that with the tournament results, the communal recognition of groups in the game, and some great rewards, we could upgrade the sense of achievement our players get to another level. We ended up building a community where they also share their thoughts, build friendships, and communicate over the achievements they completed. They did not settle with in-game team chat and even started some fan pages over social media sites where they continue to share their team name, team score, lucky spin results, tournament score, and much more about the game. Some of these are actually "achievements" that our players made up and enjoyed sharing.

To download and play our game now:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/match-3d/id1502447854

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