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The Game

I designed Cooking Merge based on a variety of popular merge games that were doing well around the same time.
The aim of the project was to create a game that was made:

• With a small team - In this case there were 4 of us on the main team, with a couple of people helping here and there with audio, store assets and other little bits
• In a short period of time - This one took a few months (hard to be exact as team members were pulled onto other project here and there)
• Using characters we could one day make into our own studio IP - Created characters with personality that were interesting to see was a bit step towards creating a cast of reusable characters
• Using adverts as the primary monetisation model - We started with having interstitials after each turn, as well as rewarded ads for improving earnings. I'd hoped to revisit and add more in time.

The aim of the game is to unlock all of the characters by merging all the way to the top of the hierarchy, which will mean first mean 1 with 1 to make 2, then merge 2 with 2 to make 3, etc. Each level of character you create would take exponentially more merges than previous ones, making it more and more time consuming to get further. Level 1 would come out of the lootboxes, level 2 took 1 merge, level 3 took 3 merges, level 4 took 7 merge, etc. the formula was previous level x2 +1, meaning by level 22 (the number of characters we had) you'd need to merge over 4 million times! This was great for the game as it allowed us to:

• Encourage players to return often and merge a few more levels
• Watch ads to bump a character up by one level
• Purchase iAPS to earn money at a faster rate for a period of time, or get higher level characters from lootboxes
• Create a store solely for the purpose of selling higher level characters for in game currency

Each character had a little bio that would be shown whenever you unlocked that character for the first time, or when you viewed them in the store, as well as an accompanying voice over to reflect the character's personality. Each character would earn an amount of coins per second they were on the merge board, with the next level earning double, encouraging you to always merge that one last time to earn a bit more while you're away.

My Work

This game came about mainly because a project fell through leaving myself, a programmer and an artist free for a period of time. Rather than idle in this time I found the best performing game of the time, that was within the realms of possibility for 3 developers (soon to be 4) to create in a short period of time, and got to work under the radar.

I'd hoped that would would have enough time before more work came along to at least prove what we could do in that period, and create some exciting characters to stir up some emotions in the rest of the studio. Taking the role of vision holder, as well as designer and producer (by which I mean a long list of task to be crossed off each day) I got to work on the following tasks:

• Breaking down the economies of the top performing examples of these merge games and replicating it for ourselves
• Deciding on the iAPs we'd offer, as well as rewarded ads and store items for currency
• Writing an interesting but fun bio for each character that reflected their personality and made the player smile
• Write sound bites each character would say and encouraging all members of the studio to get involved in recording a voice or two, with myself recording a load too
• Using UX knowledge to create UI mockups and flows of how the game would be played by the player, so the artist could create the screens and the programmer could implement them
• Creating specific breakdowns of when we'd want audio and SFX in the game, and what we'd want
• Designing the Store screenshots / video and the text to be shown on them

Within a few weeks we had enough to prove this was a viable product that could be taken to market, with an interesting cast of characters that people would love. Despite not getting any UA support and therefore having low download numbers, it does perform well with those who do play it, with plenty of ads being watched and iAPs being purchased.