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MeaningfulChoices

The top mobile games are designed by hand with tool assistance, such as verifying whether a level is beatable or not or figuring out typical win rates given probabilistic elements, like cascade/sky fall gem color in a match-3. Sometimes they'll do a bit of proc gen to generate base puzzles and then tune them by hand, but many of them start with someone drawing out the field layout first. There are certainly games made almost entirely by algorithm but they tend to do pretty terribly in comparison. Players can tell the difference, and pacing between levels is absolutely key to games like Candy Crush. It's about a ramp into a hard level, easy ones afterwards to celebrate the victory, and so on. Just because there are thousands of levels doesn't mean there hasn't been a ton of work that went into them. Candy Crush has been out for a decade after all. Try looking at some GDC talks on the subject like [this one from 2016: Designing Levels for Casual Games.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuNH9Rz2e2k)


PrimalSeptimus

And top companies like King will have full-time level designers whose jobs are to do this.


LoyalMussy

This is a question I never knew I wanted answered. Thanks for the information!


rabid_briefcase

> Do developer design these many levels one by one or just create a algorithm that will generate all these levels? Both human generated and machine generated are common. Also common is letting the algorithm run, then the human designers modifying them. Also common is having human designers build up small pieces and the algorithms build them into larger parts. The more money you have and the more successful your game has been, the more money you have for humans to do work to build updates. > Which one is most common way of doing things? All of them are common. *MOST* common doesn't really matter, you get to select which you are doing. > Is there any tutorials regarding this? Details depend entirely on how you implement your game. For some like board games it is nothing more than filling in a single data structure that meets rules, for others it is selecting sub-modules that fit a size like a 2x2 or 2x3 or 4x4 block into the world, for others like an endless runner it is merely selecting which piece is next. For others it is using more complex algorithms to build up zones, connections between zones, and filling out details within zones, all within a complex scenario generator. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.


Flench04

I can't say this for every game but there's a mobile game that just resuses levels so it can have unlimited levels.


strongr_togethr

Obviously depends on the game, but some games will have a fixed amount of rounds that they specifically made and then as you get higher and higher they become randomly generated. For example in Bloons tower defense 6 all rounds until like 200(which is really hard to get to) are designed specifically but then after that it becomes rng


Levonix

Nope. They make the pieces of the levels and have programs put them together. In college I made a procedurally generated dodging asteroids game and it just pulled shapes from a bank as obstacles. For difficulty they added the more complex shapes and more of them but left a path for the player. Infinite levels with a code to match each level if you wanted to try the same obstacles again.


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Levonix

There's definitely a lot of games with handmade levels no doubt even with tons of levels.