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Designing Hoyle Enchanted Puzzles
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April 1, 2008 |
by Poh Tun Kai
We Casual Review folks love casual games, and this is because we don’t just work at reviewing games, we also make them. I’ve been away from this site for the past few months for certain game-related reasons. I’d humbly like to show you one of these reasons:
Hoyle Enchanted Puzzles!
  We had a few important design goals in mind when we made this “wizard’s apprentice” game: Plenty of variety of gameplay, a cool story with choices for the player, and an Experience tracking system that determines which games you unlock first and also which ending you get.
We wanted Hoyle Enchanted Puzzles to have a big smorgasbord of fun casual games designs – basically, putting nine games in one, each with 25 levels. You’ll find nine of our favorite casual game types in Hoyle Enchanted Puzzles, including a fishing game, match-3, marble popping, block matching, a fireworks game, a racing game, as well as our own tripeaks and mahjong puzzles. In order to vary the gameplay even more, we made every fifth level a bonus level with a special twist. For instance, instead of catching fish, you might be trying to shrink them instead. Or instead of popping random colored blocks, you might have to solve a special puzzle made up of several layers of specific colors that must be popped with as few moves as possible.
 We also wanted to create a “choose your own story” feeling to the Hoyle Enchanted Puzzles. As you progress through the game, you will get story screens from time to time in which you encounter magical objects or creatures, and you will be given choices about how you want to progress in the story. Some choices will give you a number of points of magical Experience (explained below) while others will not, so you ought to choose wisely. We generally tried to reward player curiosity as well as unselfish choices, but there are no choices which will cause you to lose the game, so feel free to follow your heart when you go through the story!
 More importantly, we wanted the player to eventually reach an ending to the game which differed depending on which games they excelled at. Because of that, there are three kinds of magical Experience you gain in the game, which determine which kind of ending you can get. After winning each level of a game, you will not only get a score showing how well you did, but also the number of points you earned in one or more types of magical Experience. The three types of Experience are Craft Experience (indicated by the potion icon), Nature Experience (indicated by the tree icon) and Mind Experience (indicated by the wizard’s hat icon). You need to spend varying amounts of a specific type of Experience to unlock five levels of each game. When you finish all the levels of each game, you will graduate to becoming a powerful wizard of the Valley of Skye, and your exact title (Sorceress, Enchantress, or Loremaster) will depend on which type of Experience you earned the most of - regardless of how much you spent to unlock games.
I’m really proud of the time and effort that my colleagues at Boomzap Games spent working on Hoyle Enchanted Puzzles. Our friends at Flipside Games did a smash-up job with the art, and I can’t be any happier with the wizardly music and sound effects from Somatone. I hope you’ll find at least a little gaming magic to enjoy in Hoyle Enchanted Puzzles.
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