In a postmortem at GDC 2013 for wildly popular casual game Candy Crush Saga, King.com's Tommy Palm shares that while luck plays a part in keeping his players entertained, luck played no part in the game development process.
This Candy Crush Saga talk quickly filled to capacity, with hundreds of other attendees queued in GDC's halls. Courtesy of the GDC Vault, this lecture is now free for everyone to watch.
Session Name:Candy Crush Saga Postmortem: Luck in the Right Places
Speaker(s): Tommy Palm
Company Name(s): King.com
Track / Format: Free to Play Design & Business Summit
Overview: Luck. Does it exist? The question is at least as old as Aristotle, as he examined the differences between chance and luck. If he were alive today, he would agree that luck is certainly an important factor in casual games. Luck, as opposed to skill, is important in order to make casual players enjoy hundreds of levels of a game without getting too frustrated. Of equal importance, is to remove luck out of the equation of making great games.
In any hit-driven business, good methods of removing risk will increase the likelihood of having long-term success. This postmortem will walk the audience through the making of Candy Crush Saga, one of the most successful casual games in the world. The talk will describe how King.com removed luck from the game making process, while sprinkling it in balanced proportions throughout the map and levels of the game. This process led to one trillion candies being crushed in less than a year's time, with the game becoming the number one social game by DAU, and one of the top 5 monetizing games on mobile in the top 10 markets.
About the GDC Vault
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It's one of those newfangled "Fruit Machines"!
I'm glad the person at the end asked about the lack of in-game currency. I don't think I would have thought about that otherwise.