Fruit Jam Blast (2026)
Peoplefun
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 0 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.
Project Process & Breakdown
Pre-Production:
The goal of Tap Jam was to create a low-cost game with good early player retention, session lengths, a low cost-per-install rate (CPI), and a project that had a fitting scope for our small team and our expertise in casual game development.
The PM and I looked at similar hyper-casual puzzle games such as Unpuzzle, Screw Jam, and Coin Match 3D as they fit the scope and KPIs we sought. I found that each of the games had a few key features for success, which I then translated into our core game design pillars:
Easy-to-understand core loop
The core loop has to be understood almost immediately with very brief tutorials to get players going.
Snappy and satisfying UX
The gameplay needs to have a tactile feel to it through UX, sound and pacing. Each move should feel satisfying to make and quick enough that players can make consecutive moves in a rapid fashion without any delays.
Tension and release pacing
The game should have moments where the player is almost out of options, and where a single move creates exciting chain reactions into a satisfying conclusion.
I conveyed these pillars to the team, and since this was a market test, no level editor was created. Our first milestone was creating a handful of easy, medium, and hard levels that demonstrated the basic gameplay, and a method for me to design these levels. I hand-coded the levels utilizing a JSON script which we fed into Firebase, which was our server-based software that let us make changes without requiring new builds.
Early look and feel:
I did not have prior experience with designing levels for a slide puzzle before, so I had to establish a workflow that allowed me to design solvable levels, and gauge the challenge rating before implementing levels into the game. For this, I used Google Slides, as it is my go-to for quick mockups. I created a “tile palette” and a grid system serving as a template for each level. This way I, or anyone who wanted to participate in level creation, could easily copy-paste from the palette into the grid, and quickly see the design restrictions.
I would often start with a single concept, such as “I want to teach players that they can move tiles into other tiles”, “I want to introduce a new mechanic and force players to observe or interact with it”, or “I want a level to look intimidating, but in reality is really easy and almost impossible to fail (Only very perceptive players would catch on to this)”. I would create a first draft, then solve it move-by-move in Google Slides to emulate the gameplay. This proved very effective and allowed me to vet levels with the team before implementing them into the game.
Changing the tile design:
We initially used colored tiles with white arrows, which allowed for the creation of pixel art puzzles, but it affected the game’s readability with future game mechanics. We switched to white tiles with color arrows, and this allowed for seamless game readability when special tiles were introduced in later levels.
The PM and I discussed and agreed that introducing mechanics early was important to:
Demonstrate to players that the game experience is ever-evolving, and
Communicate that there are new surprises around every corner if they keep playing.
In addition, I designed the UX to display the remaining levels required to beat before the next game mechanic is unlocked. My hypothesis was that this helped increase player session length and retention.
Level Mechanics:
For the market test, we had five new level mechanics we introduced over the game’s initial content: Mystery Tiles, Spawner Tiles, Special Shape Tiles, Ice Tiles, and Jelly Tiles. It was important to me that each new mechanic felt unique from the previous and could be used in tandem or combined with all other mechanics. I approached each mechanic like the level tools found in the Mario Maker games, where they could stand on their own feet, but if combined with another, it would create a wonderful synergy. With that in mind, each mechanic could in theory be layered on each other (i.e. a Freeze Tile could reveal a Mystery Tile when melted, or a Jelly Tile could hide a Special Shape when all the jelly was removed).
User Testing:
We conducted external user testing, which verified that almost every player fully understood the gameplay mechanics and dynamics 3 to 4 levels into the game. I keep the “goodwill” system from Steve Krug’s book, “Don’t Make Me Think” in mind when gauging a player’s retention and stickiness.
In his book, Krug views patience as a resource that can be depleted and refilled through various actions and gestures when a user interacts with your designs. But once the goodwill is spent, the user will leave, and most likely never return. My goal was to ensure the first 5 levels were impossible to fail to guarantee players had time to get invested in the game before throwing any real challenge at them and ensure that there was no early game friction. I designed some levels to look challenging, but in reality, there was very little chance for danger.
Additionally, I made sure that even difficult levels that utilized spawners and mystery tiles were not difficult due to players having to guess the right move. Some of the titles I researched had this, and it never felt fair or fun when I failed a level because I happen to pick the wrong move in a 50/50 scenario. Therefore, even when players had to make a guess, the guess should not cause a fail state, but instead up the importance of the player’s next move and they were forced to make another risk assessment. If a player failed a level, it should always be apparent to players what caused the failure and how to correct it next time.
Takeaways:
The team was able to successfully prototype Tap Jam and create an engaging and innovative puzzle game in three months. We had plans in place to further develop daily reward systems, add more player boosts, and utilize more of the game’s softcurrency after initial market testing, but unfortunately, Lion Studios chose not to continue developing Tap Jam after only one week of market testing.
Even so, I am ultimately proud of the work I and the team put into the game and the experience gained along the way. In the pre-production phase, I discovered and improved on elements that hook players in some of the most successful casual games out there. During the level design phase, I developed an effective workflow with the limitations we had for creating complex puzzles for a genre I had not worked in before, and I further developed my skills in puzzle design specifically.
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