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.