My Role:

Game Designer, Level Designer

On Fruit Jam Blast, my core responsibilities were redesigning and pivoting an existing prototype alongside a tech artist and an engineer, with the goal of making the game faster, more dynamic, and bursting with personality.

This was a small and nimble collaboration of three people, which meant everyone wore multiple hats and design decisions had to move quickly. My focus was on the design pivot itself: rethinking the core interaction, the game's pacing, and its identity.

During the project's development, my main notable contributions were:

• Redesign the core interaction from the ground up, shifting from a tap-and-drag merge mechanic to a tap-to-merge system that rewarded players for building larger clusters and reacted instantly to their input.

• Define the power-up system and its scaling behavior, where larger clusters produced more powerful power-ups, and adjacent power-ups could merge into even stronger ones, creating the chain reactions at the heart of the game's appeal.

• Contribute to the game's feel and identity, working closely with a tech artist to introduce animated, expressive fruit pieces and faster physics that transformed the game's energy entirely.

• Introduce multi-segmented levels to give each level a sense of progression and narrative within a single play session, moving away from the static board states of the game it was built from.

• Design and balance level content, gradually introducing new mechanics that shifted the goal and approach of each level, giving players new challenges to master as they progressed.

Project Process & Breakdown

Where It Started:

Fruit Jam Blast was not a game built from scratch. It was a pivot of a game that had been in development for a few months, but was not hitting the early Day 1 engagement numbers we needed to justify continuing in its current form. Rather than sunset it, we looked at what wasn't working and asked whether the core idea still had potential under the surface, and see how we could emphasize what worked while pruning what didn’t.

Rethinking the Core Interaction:

The previous prototype required players to tap a piece and drag it across the board to merge it with a matching piece anywhere in play. It was functional, but it felt deliberate and slow..

In the new version, tapping a piece automatically merged all neighboring pieces of the same type in one go. It was instant, it was readable, and it immediately made the game feel more action-oriented. Bigger clusters produced bigger power-ups, and two adjacent power-ups could merge into something even more powerful. The result was a game that rewarded players for thinking a step ahead and encouraged players to set up the game board before executing big, satisfying merges.

Making It Feel Alive:

Two changes made the biggest difference to how the game felt, and neither of them was something I initially anticipated having such a dramatic impact.

The first was physics. We increased the gravity on the falling pieces so they dropped noticeably faster after each merge. It sounds minor, but it made the game feel completely different. The board was always in motion, always reacting, and that energy kept players engaged between moves in a way the original never managed.

The second were the fruits themselves. Rather than just being static, inanimate board pieces, each fruit was given a pair of eyes that blinked and tracked the player's movements. They reacted to being struck by power-ups, and they made sounds as they fell. With those small changes, it suddenly felt like the game had so much personality, which gave the game the identity we had been looking for.

The power-ups also painted the edges of the level with fruit juice as they tore through the board, which was a polish detail that fit the theme perfectly and added a visual punctuation mark to every big move, and a tinge of silly morbidity.

Level Design:

The previous prototype had largely static boards where the game state didn't change much between moves. For Fruit Jam Blast, we introduced multi-segmented levels, where the board itself could evolve across a session, giving players sub-goals to work toward and a sense of narrative progression within a single level.

New mechanics were introduced gradually over the course of the level content, each one meaningfully changing the approach and goal of the level it appeared in. My aim was that each new mechanic felt like a fresh question being asked of the player, rather than just a new obstacle placed in their way.

Takeaways:

Fruit Jam Blast did not hit the Day 0 benchmark we needed, unfortunately, and the project did not continue past this iteration. That said, it was one of the more creatively satisfying projects I have been a part of, and a genuinely fun collaboration between three people who cared a lot about what they were making.

The biggest thing I took away from this project is how much a small number of targeted changes can transform a game's feel entirely. Adjusting the gravity, giving the fruit some eyes, switching from drag-to-merge to tap-to-merge: none of these are big engineering lifts, but together they produced something that felt like a completely different game. Sometimes the concept is fine. Sometimes what it needs is just a little more added dynamism or life.