Highlights
Featured
Featured
Jake Shuman
Game Designer
Highlights
Overview:
For the first time ever in Candy Crush, players could play against one another in PvP. I helped design the foundation for PvP, as well as 4 sub-features that made up the core to PvP. I was solely responsible for concepting and then leading these features up until release.
My Role:
Game (Systems) Designer
While working on Jelly, my role was to design and lead features that closely matched the vision of Jelly’s future set by our Lead Game Designer. Together, we would determine which direction the game needed to take and then we would form a plan of what’s needed. At this point, I would concept rough ideas, collect feedback and then present this to our team’s leadership. Once approved, the feature would enter full production and I would support the feature and team throughout it’s life.
Extras:
An immense amount of research went into PvP’s design and production. Seeing as this information was invaluable, I started a collection of workshops that were meant to share anything we learned with the other design teams. This evolved into a monthly course that covered all forms of Game Development. We covered topics ranging from designing an effective system for Casual Mobile games all the way to learning 3D Level Design & scripting.
Overview:
I originally entered King as a Level Designer and was assigned with creating levels. During my first 6 months, I designed and lead multiple projects that saw a significant increase to level production and player retention. Shortly after this, I was recruited to the Original Candy Crush team, where I worked for roughly 8 months before returning to Jelly to become a Game Designer.
My Role:
Technical Level Designer
My first experiment consisted of categorizing all types of levels that King Designers were making and then implementing them into our tracking tools. I did this by converting terms like “explosive” and “grindy” into accurate variables to track across all King levels. This proved to be challenging because if any data from this was to be used, it must be 100% accurate to claim anything. I worked through this by working very closely with our data team and then together we were able to convert the entire philosophy of Level Design into accurate traceable metrics.
With this new data, we were instantly able to identify the weakest points in Level Design and immediately reiterate. For example, our biggest discovery was that a specific type of level that all designers would regularly create was actually churning away 80% more players than other level types. We were able to quickly correct this and launch a plan to overhaul all levels that shared that same level type. In total, this contributed to us increasing player retention by 20%.
Extras:
I earned the title “Technical” Level Designer because for every experiment I ran, I built minor tools to track and manage the progress of each experiment. After a year of this, King created a new role for myself and another designer that I worked closely with.
Role:
Technical Level Designer/Game Designer
Balanced Levels, analyzed player analytics, hypothesized experiments and drove them until completion, Wrote documentation, mentored junior designers.
Tools Used:
Unity3D, Custom Engine, Microsoft Office, Adobe illustrator/Photoshop, in house built analytics.
Programming Languages Used:
C# (during experimentation projects)
Length:
< 1 year
Platform:
Windows, IOs, Android, Facebook
Overview:
During my time on candy Crush Jelly, my biggest accomplishment was driving a hypothesis that increased level production and decreased player churn. In short, the project saw missed potential in an area of the game. After investigating and forming a potential solution, the game itself saw a decrease in churn and helped level designers create levels quicker than they ever have before. Overall, the increase was roughly 20%.