Josh Kleber
Candy Blast Mania
"Candy Blast Mania is a match 3 puzzle game where you can match and collect candies in this delightfully delicious adventure, guaranteed to satisfy any sweet tooth!"
General Description:
Candy Blast Mania is a Free-To-Play Match-3 puzzle game for your mobile device. There are various obstacles that are sprinkled throughout the game which keep the player hooked and wondering what will be next. With over 2,000 levels to play from, and more being released weekly, there are plenty of opportunities for failure and success. Luckily, if the player fails too much and wants some assistance, they can get that with the help of premium currency.
Company: Storm8
Supported Devices: Changes w/ updates
Duration: ~10 Months
Role: Associate Game Designer
Responsibilities:
While working on Candy Blast Mania one of my main responsibilities were Level Creation, Level Tuning, and Documentation.
​
Level Creation:
As of this moment there are just over 2,000 levels in the game with most likely more on the way. In the 10 months that I worked there I created about 200 of those levels. In order to create levels that hit all of the right points, and were ready to go live, I participated in countless Level Reviews.
​
In these Level Reviews I would join the rest of my team and play each others levels multiple times while talking about which aspects were perfect and which needed to be edited.
​
Level Tuning:
Once the levels that I created went live for the players to enjoy, one of my jobs was to tune the level so that they weren't too easy or too difficult. Without going into too much detail, the levels are never supposed to be impossible to win or lose and the tuning was to ensure that the appropriate number of people were beating the levels.
Documentation:
The last of my responsibilities was creating Documentation. I was in charge of creating several One Pagers and Specs to showcase and flesh out new mechanics or obstacles for the game. The One Pagers would be reviewed by engineers and Leads and then revised into Specs.
​
Post Mortem:
I joined Storm8 as an Associate Game Designer on a 6 month Contract. Once I had proven my worth I became fully employed there as an Associate Game Designer and continued working there for another 4 and half months.
​
I worked very closely with the rest of the puzzle team which consisted of 2 Lead Designers, 2 Seniors Designers, 1 Designer, and 5 other Associate Designers.
​
Due to the fact that I worked on this game on LiveOps, all of our work was spent on updating and maintaining Candy Blast Mania. This was my first LiveOps job, and I enjoyed it very much. Communication with the rest of my team was extremely easy, and if there was anything in our schedule that was optimized, we were able to fix it quickly.