Dumb Ways to Draw

Responsibilities:

Creating, playtesting and iterating puzzle designs for a series of holiday-themed updates.

Working closely with external clients to maintain brand consistency.

Pitching live-ops content and monitoring the game's economy.

Case Study: Halloween Stage Pack

Tasked with creating holiday-themed level packs for Dumb Ways to Draw I used the opportunity to flex my puzzle-design skills and create a series of challenging stages that could serve as a standalone experience, disconnected from the rest of the game's core levels.

Looking to the Halloween update as an example, I considered that new players may access the holiday stages only shortly after a fresh-install and therefore needed to be eased into the game's mechanics.

The process of developing Stage 3, showing it from sketch to completion.

Stage 6, after teaching players the Candy Cane & Pumpkin mechanics in isolation, combines them together in a rube-goldberg style death trap.

Each stage started it's life as a sketch before being prototyped in engine to undergo testing and feedback. Finally, after a number of iterative balancing passes, the level would have its art assets finalised and swapped out with any thematic variants.

Because these stages could be designed in a bubble without considering if a player had seen the mechanics before, I took to using Koichi Hayashida's 4-step level design approach from the recent Super Mario games:

Introduce a new mechanic to teach players how it works.
Offer a slightly more complex variation on that mechanic.
Twist the mechanic in a surprising or unexpected way.
Challenge the player to demonstrate their mastery of the mechanic.

By following these steps I was able to craft puzzles that otherwise may have felt out of place, ensuring that a player had full understanding of the stage's mechanics leading up to these fun and surprising stages.