Patterns

General information

Link:	Patterns
Platforms:	Web (Phone and PC)
Genres:	Puzzle, Casual
Copyright holder:	Ludo Leo
Development time:	5 months

Introduction

In Patterns you help Ellie recreate magical patterns using grass, fire, clouds, and more elements as you uncover the hidden order of each level.

The game features 2 game modes with in total over 70 levels, and localisation in 7 languages.

I've produced all the assets in the game with the exception being the background music and most of the SFX.

Design process

A couple years ago I wrote a thesis about how to apply game design principles to an artifical level designer for match-3 games. In it I came to the conclusion that most match-3 levels are made up of patterns applied in a specific order. This is what inspired me to make Patterns.

The initial idea of Patterns was quite simple, players had to figure out which shapes I had applied to the grid to make the example pattern. It was only after I prototyped that, that I explored more mechanics such as different colored tiles and eventually the different elements.

Prototyping

Recently I made a small prototype called EcoTycoon, where players could manipulate a 3 dimensional grid in various ways, with some minor adjustments this project proved to be a good starting point for Patterns.

After a couple days of work, I was able to convert EcoTycoon to the first interactable version of Patterns. I supported 5 different shapes, that could be applied to a grid to make a pattern.

After a month of work I had the first playable prototype of Patterns. It featured 10 levels that showed an example image that you had to recreate within x amount of steps. To do this you could place shapes down on the grid, that you could scale to be bigger after placing them down.
After creating this prototype I knew that I had something fun on my hands. I verified my thoughts by letting as many different people as possible play it. Most people seemed to really engage with it, so I decided to start developing it full time.

Patterns felt like the perfect game to play when you had a couple minutes to spare and wanted an engaging puzzle. In order to fulfill that space, I started looking into a mobile version of the game. I studied various sucessful mobile games and redesigned the UI to a mobile space. This is also where the idea of a mascot character was born.

I wanted to make the game feel like a journey and had several worlds planned which you could navigate in a map scene. This idea was quickly found to be overly ambitious and I scrapped it to save time for other features.

While testing the game I noticed that a lot of players had a hard time figuring out the controls. After redesigning the input system a couple of times, I managed to reduce the confusion of new players, but there was still a sizeable amount of players that didn't understand how you could scale and place the tiles. After some time, I decided to make the scaling of the tiles a different unlockable game mode. This greatly increased the amount of players that got through the first couple of levels.