Gameplay Breakdown

Love & Pies (Trailmix Ltd) is a merge game involving the player combining items to finish orders. This takes place on the player’s board, which over time becomes cluttered with items. When the player finishes an order they earn gold. Gold is then used to progress the mystery story involving the game's main character. As the story progresses, the player encounters new objects used for pricier orders. In this blog post, we will look into design strategies from Love & Pies which we can apply to our titles.

Form gameplay experiences with challenging and gratifying moments

Designers look to create a sort of staircase graph to mold the player's experience. We want there to be sequential times of smooth sailing to struggling. Love & Pies achieves this through a form of real estate management. Creating orders, by design, takes up space on the limited tiled board. Looking to complete high-level orders thus entails space management challenges. Creating these orders causes claustrophobic situations that are relieved only by completing them. This allows players to look forward to finishing challenging orders to free up space and keep merging.

Give Players a Sense of Progress

Player progression is often tied to arbitrary power numbers. These simple numeric values denote how strong the player is, or how far a player is in the game. One way Love & Pies improves on this is by including world-building as part of the progression. The initial state of the bakery is in disarray but over time evolves with the players' decisions. This visual representation of progress also offers a way for player personalization. The bakery transforming from a decrepit building to a customer-serving eatery is impactful. Players can look at the rooms that are still in need of work and generate a sense of wonder to continue playing.

Establish the Value of Watching Ads

When done right, ads can serve as a viable monetization option while being a vehicle for progress. In Love & Pies, they achieve this by surfacing duplicate items on mid-level merges. By watching an ad, players can claim the duplicate before it turns into a gold coin taking up valuable tile space. By surfacing the ad at this moment, developers make the 30-second ad look like a steal. Players know exactly the amount of time invested to create the item and know that watching the ad would be a time saver. By making the system reactive, ads look like tempting asymmetric opportunities.

Keep Players Wondering What Comes Next

After players get into the groove, designers want to have strategies to keep them invested. One approach taken by Love & Pies involves item-blocked tiles on the player's board. These tiles become unlocked once a player merges the blocking item with its pair. Players don't know when exactly the item pair will surface. As players progress they'll get the needed pair and free up a long-lasting blocked tile. This serves to stir the player's curiosity throughout their playthrough. Players will be ever curious if the next order completion will give something new.

Join The Team

Here at Funovus, we love to explore and study successful mobile games to find insights we can share with our team to level up our collective experience. Through our open collaborative efforts, we can grow and make better games together. If these types of discussions appeal to you, feel free to check our open positions at https://www.funovus.com/careers

What's coming next?

In the next post, we'll do a review on another successful merge title like Merge War.

Continue to Gold, Goblins, and Good Game Design.