Farm Heroes Champions

 

     

From the makers of Candy Crush Saga comes a new casual match 3 game with a twist. Farm Heroes Champions (FHC); a fun, new puzzle adventure from the much-loved, popular franchise Farm Heroes, now with the options to play as a team.

  • Play through thousands of challenging levels and unlock new chapters
  • Collect a mix of fruit and vegetables featuring brand new Cropsies (Aubergine & Lime) as well as familiar favourites (Strawberry, Banana, Carrot, Water)
  • Option to play solo or join a team for rewards, boosters and more fun!
  • Play as a team to send and request lives, and unlock new features; Team Chest & Team Contest
  • Beat exciting game modes, with dozens of blockers for added gameplay variety
  • Climb the leaderboards and compete to become the ultimate champion

   

PRODUCT VISION

Line-blast your way through engaging switcher levels with cute cropsies, earning generous rewards to help you and your team to progress and compete.

DESIGN PILLARS

Community

  • I feel a sense of belonging as I help my club and they help me
  • I feel that I am part of something bigger as I compete to win events and climb leaderboards

Flow

  • I want to keep playing a switcher that is highly engaging and low in complexity
  • Features keep me absorbed in my progression
  • I can navigate seamlessly through an intuitive UI

Reward

  • The switcher rewards me with quick cascades, satisfying feedback and a fun level of challenge
  • Interacting with club members gives me both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards
  • Progressing through episodes, live ops and leaderboards is rewarded generously with coins and boosters, and rich audio-visual feedback

      

LEAD LEVEL DESIGN

FHC team was built up of 3 sections including the content pod, the quality pod and new features pod. I was the content pod leader whose mission was to create and maintain the best game content: to attract, engage and retain our users. Some of the main responsibilities included:

    • Live Operations: I lead the creation and delivery of content on a weekly basis. As a team we help provide games as a service, ensuring vibrant and performant content is delivered each sprint including levels, chapter art, blockers and more.
    • Roadmap Planning: I help represent level design needs in backlog planning and refinement meetings. I create and organise the future goals for content creation to ensure we are targeting the right areas to adhere to our team goals. In turn, we hope this will make the best player experience as possible.
    • Management & Leadership: I mentor and support a varied team of designers with different areas of experience. I provide feedback and mentorship so that we can all learn and grow in level design.
    • Communication: I collect, note down and share details and findings from the content pod. I regularly work and communicate with the wider team and company to ensure knowledge is shared effectively and efficiently
    • Team Process: I created, set up and maintained content creation processes such as level design processes, balancing and feedback processes, OTA (over the air) and content output processes. We then learnt, evolved and improved our processes

LEVEL DESIGN

  • Created the entire curve from conception
  • Created the first 300 levels myself
  • Helped create 1000 level
  • Tutorials and Onboarding exp
  • Worked with data sciences and business performance managers analysing each playtest to balance and maintain the best difficulty curve.
  • Helped set up and create our cross studio-level editor and other tools

   

 

Important factors of a level

  • Level layout – board shape
  • Blockers – synergy
  • Amount of colours
  • Gameplay – flow, progression (phases), player journey, feeling, length, objectives
  • Clarity – look at the level know what the goals are
  • Appropriate difficulty – relative to where it is in the saga
  • Aesthetic – levels that look nice or different / pre-set colours or patterns on the board
  • Uniqueness – it’s nice to have at best but not essential

My Process

  • Board shape or 2 blockers that synergise well together
  • Set objectives and think about the player journey – how we can prevent the player from achieving this by adding in extra features (additional blockers).
  • Pick the number of colours
  • Playtest and iterate.
  • Pick the number of moves
  • Tweak values (moves, objectives, spawn frequencies, blocker tiers) until it feels fun

CORE GAMEPLAY DESIGN

During the development of FHC, I oversaw and co-ordinated the design, art and development of all 20 blockers (board features), 3 pre-game boosters and 4 boosters.

Shown below are some of these core gameplay features:

Blockers

The idea for FHC’s blockers was to build on the original Farm franchise blockers however follow a new set of design pillars. It was important that the blockers were Scalable. Meaning they could be used multiple times in one level and that they Synergize with other blockers, layering them to able level designers to create endless amounts of levels. The blockers must be Rewarding and Engaging so that players have a fun and entertaining experience, keeping them coming back for more.

Dandelion

  • Match next to Dandelions 3 times to remove them.
  • The Dandelions will not be removed until all dandelions have been reduced to their final stage.
    • Static board item does not shuffle and isn’t affected by gravity.

 

Wheat

  • Match over a Wheat Patch to harvest it
  • Once all Wheat Patches are harvested, they will regrow
  • The Wheat Patch is a static board item that is placed on the tile behind cropsies.

 

Pre-game boosters

Cropsie Blast, Cropsie Bomb and Rainbow Cropsie

As we were making a game built around teams and social with a new progression system whereby players collect rewards as they complete levels we needed new engaging boosters that players would enjoy using and would want to gain.

Much like the blockers, we needed to create boosters that were scalable, engaging and that synergised well with one another. Additionally, they had to fit into our current core gameplay. This was one of the biggest challenges as we wanted to try new and different things but after feedback session players found it hard to understand so went back to our roots and kept it simple using our match 3 core identity.

Cropsie Blast: Creates a star blast removing and collecting all cropsies in its path. It also triggers blockers and other boosters.

Cropsie Bomb: Creates a blast within an area around it removing and collecting all cropsies. It also triggers blockers and other boosters. We made the blast and bomb activate each other so there could be fun chain reactions and engaging player experience.

Rainbow Cropsie: Collects all cropsies of the same colour. Can only be triggered by a player matching it. We made this decision as we wanted to give the player more control and we thought it would be more rewarding, allowing for more strategy.

Boosters

  For the main boosters, we brought over the shovel and basket from our previous farm titles and kept them the same only giving them a reskin as we thought these were core useful boosters players enjoyed.

We added in a reshuffle but after playtesting we felt it would be more rewarding to make it so that the reshuffle could shuffle cropises into matches making it more rewarding which was a nice iteration on the mechanic compared to other titles.
We added two new boosters as we felt we needed something more impactful and allow for more strategy.

The watering can was created to provide this impact. If you water a cropsie of any colour it multiplies and falls onto the board randomly creating lots of matches and cascades. It’s a fun easy to use booster that creates a lot of impact for a fun experience.

The glove was created to provide more agency and control to the player. You can swap any cropsies with another in any tile on the board. This meant players could plan ahead and feel really smart setting up large matches to win levels.