Between Clash of Clans and Clash Royale the folks at Finnish game dev Supercell have proved they’ve got serious game design chops, and at this year’s Game Developers Conference you’ll get to see how they’ve built their latest hit!
Notably, Supercell designer Antti Summala will be giving a Design track talk on “‘Designing Two Tasty Cores Three Times Over: The Case of ‘Brawl Stars'” that’s all about how Brawl Stars was born and optimized for success.
With controls much more demanding than those in previous Supercell games, a lot of design and prototyping effort was put into making Brawl Stars as simple and as well-suited for mobile touchscreen devices as possible. At the same time, a very small team with only a handful of developers needed to design a long-term player progression system that would be a good match for the team’s limited content creation capacity.
After the game soft launched in June 2017, its player metrics weren’t quite reaching the ambitious goals. This prompted the game team to try to improve the game: not just polishing it up, but making major changes as well, while that was still possible. What followed was a more than one-year long beta where the team tried to decide between two control models but ended up with a third, and redesigned the progression system twice, both fundamental core aspects of the game. This session will present the different controls and progression solutions, and based on metrics, argue that they were all good designs and any one of these six iterations of core elements could have worked!
Further details on this talk and many more are available now on the GDC 2019 Session Scheduler! There you can begin to lay out your GDC 2019, which takes place March 18th through the 22nd at the (newly renovated!) Moscone Center in San Francisco.
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