Level Designers Answer Your Questions!!!

🌟No account yet? Register here in just 2 seconds! 🌟

Hey everyone!

Thanks so much for submitting all of your questions to me and the rest of the Candy Friends Level Designers here! We loved hearing all of your opinions and musings on the game (as always!). We hope you find our answers below interesting!

We test all of our levels thoroughly to create a fun and engaging experience. We like to get the right balance of having levels challenging enough to not feel trivial, but not so hard that you feel as though you can't progress. It's a delicate balancing act! - John, Senior Level Designer

We always make sure there is a range of difficulties in our levels - some tricky ones to test your skills, but also some easier ones to bring down the tension too! We decide the difficulties for our levels in advance and design them to match that difficulty as closely as we can. To do this, we like to split into groups and play each others levels over and over to get a really good feel for them, but we also look at how our players - you - perform as well, just to make sure we're hitting the mark! - Jordan, Level Designer

Some characters work better in certain levels than in others. When designing a level, we decide on which characters would work best for its layout and flow; e.g. Caramel Cup-heavy levels are great for Nutcracker, whilst more diagonal boards work well for Bubblegum Troll. We decide on a Primary and Secondary character to recommend, and the third choice will cycle through other applicable characters for that level. Some characters won't be playable in a level - Yeti won't show up in a level without cyan candies, for example. - Jordan, Level Designer

We plan for each level to have a specific difficulty before we release it, based on where the level exists, whether it's a tutorial, part of an event, etc. We playtest all of our levels within the team, so the designer of any level will seek feedback from the rest of the level design team on the overall experience and whether the difficulty feels appropriate. - John, Senior Level Designer

All of the level designers have their own creative process, and their own way of thinking up new level ideas. For me personally, in our level editor I like to create an interesting board shape first - just experiment and play around to find something I feel like could work as a playable space. From there I'll decide what blockers I can use to fill the different sections of the board, and then think of how I can create an interesting and fun journey within that for the player to experience. Honestly for inspiration, I look to the rest of my team! We play each others levels often and discuss our ideas. This way we all learn from one another and are inspired by each other's creativity. The more exposure you get to different ways of thinking about the game the better! - John, Senior Level Designer

When designing a new episode of levels, we tend to nominate one designer who is responsible for the functionality, which includes the game modes and the flow of that episode. However, there's a feedback process that the design team go through to ensure that the episode is fun and the game modes are distributed in a fun way. - Josh, Junior Level Designer

When we're looking for new ideas relating to character powers, new blockers or new features, we think about it in a few ways. What's missing from the game - what do the players (you guys!) frequently request? What opportunities for improving our level design 'toolkit' are there? With the most recent character (Jelly Queen) for example, we knew we didn't have a character that was helpful for Jam levels and players were asking for this a lot. So we started thinking of different ways we could approach this problem. We'll typically hold ideation sessions where design and members from all across the team get together to generate ideas. Then we'll refine and test these ideas by building some levels with it to balance it and make sure it isn't under/overpowered before releasing it into the live game. - John, Senior Level Designer

We usually base this on the game mode, board layout, game flow and candy colours to decide the recommended character in every level. Since some characters work better on certain levels than in others, we will test the potential recommended characters during our testing sessions. This process helps to make sure the character bring a positive impact on level progress and the best game experience to all of you! - Verena, Junior Level Designer

We choose the game mode first. That often determines what characters we can use - Olivia and Jelly Queen, for example, are game mode-specific characters. Then we factor in what characters work best for a level's design (sometimes we tailor a level to a specific character, other times we see which ones performs the best in the level). The outfits are chosen by the player, unless there's an event that we dress up our characters for! As for our new game mode process, we'll decide on what the goal should be first - what type of experience we want to provide - and then we'll add specifics to our foundation and build up! It's what we call a Top-Down Design. Start at the top, and dig down into specifics. - Jordan, Level Designer

Our designers always have new ideas buzzing around our heads. These might be ideas to add to and improve an existing experience, or provide a whole new dynamic of play unlike any we've made before (e.g. the Hazelnut Crunch). We hold a super fun ideation session where we all throw our ideas at a board, talk them through, and see what ideas we think have the most potential. Sometimes the inspiration is as simple as staring at some delicious candy and dreaming up what it might do in our levels (level designers get hungry too!) - Jordan, Level Designer

There might be a little something in the works... 😄 - Jordan, Level Designer

We of course always collaborate with other King game teams to share what is working well with their events and features, but we try not to just do an exact copy of events in other games. We like to learn what works best for successful events and then use that knowledge to create something based on those learnings, but that works well and is unique for Candy Crush Friends. - John, Senior Level Designer

Unfortunately, Candy Friends doesn't have it at the moment. We are actively considering to offer new boosters in the game as always. The swift hand booster might be one of it. If you have any thought towards the booster, feel free to tell us your ideas! - Jordan, Level Designer

With our live events, there could be some that only run in certain regions at certain times. This is for a number of potential reasons - we could be testing a new event in a particular region, or there might be an event that one region would celebrate, but wouldn't make sense to run elsewhere. The majority of our major events do already run worldwide, so no one should be missing out on too much! - John, Senior Level Designer

It's an interesting idea! Sadly there's no option right now to allow the players to see a level's blockers - though I'd love to see that! - but perhaps there's a way to help you guys hunt down levels with the blockers you need for your Quests. Thank you for the ideas; we'll discuss it further with our team! - Jordan, Level Designer

We don't have any concrete plans right now to add this feature into the game, but watch this space! Your thoughts and ideas really do make a difference to what we put in the game, so thanks for the feedback - the more you raise certain issues, the more we'll know it's something you guys care about and the more likely we'll address it in future updates. - John, Senior Level Designer

We've got so many ideas for new features, it's crazy! The list goes on forever, so we're always creating and testing new ideas for the game to keep things fresh and exciting. It takes time, but fret not - new features are on the way. Will one of them be a Portal? Only the future may tell, so stay tuned to find out! - Jordan, Level Designer

Having multiple playable characters in one level is something we have briefly discussed, so maybe it will happen at some point but there aren't any current plans to implement it. Unfortunately it is not possible right now, but who knows what the future holds! Jordan, Level Designer