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A sudden surge in popularity for a game that came out years prior should always put your designer's sense on alert: what's so special about it?
Suika Game came out on Nintendo Switch in Japan in 2021, and in the summer of 2023, it took off and ranked as the best-selling on eShop in September of that year. Watermelon Game (the literal translation) is the port of a video projector game whose gameplay mixes Tetris and 2048 (with physics). The mechanic is simple: you drop fruits in a closed rectangular area, and whenever two of the same type touch, they merge into a bigger fruit. Your goal is to get to the biggest fruit, the watermelon, a more challenging feat than it seems at first glance.
In this issue of The Arcade Artificer, we won't scratch the surface to unearth a “magic” underlying system. There's no secret that makes it entertaining, but there is still a lot to learn from it. I wanted to write about the watermelon game because it exemplifies several fundamental design principles that I notice & try to apply when it comes to entertaining games. Here are five crucial lessons that came to my mind while I was compulsively merging those damn fruits.
#1 - Clear Visual Design
Let's start with the most obvious yet often overlooked: the screen is always readable. Thanks to the use of simple shapes & colours, you can instantly distinguish fruits from one another and understand how they fit in the play area (which is one of the keys to great physics, see point #4). Only a few UI elements are on the sides, while the central area remains laser-focused.
You may object that it's easier to achieve clarity when you've got such simple rules, but I'd disagree for two reasons. First, it's part of the game designer's job to propose mechanics that can be exposed visually rather than introducing rules and leaving it to the UI/tutorial to figure out how they'll be represented.
Second, even in this game, there are lots of details which could have gone wrong. The “dropping line”, for instance, could have been a preview of how the fruit will bounce like in pool games, or maybe it could have been eliminated, but the team found the proper middle ground, and it's for the better: imagine how different the experience would feel like in those scenarios.
#2 - Correct Use of Theme
Finding a suitable theme for an abstract experience can take time and effort. From an accessibility standpoint, it's not better than numbers we can immediately compare & classify (like in 2048). They compensated for this by including the fruit chart in the bottom right to help you remember how fruits chain.
However, the fruit-based theme is an excellent idea because it adds flavour (literally). Everybody knows fruit, they're colourful & you've got an intuition for their relative side, so there's a sense of logic & order (more about that later), which adds to the satisfying game feel. Crafting an entertaining experience also involves finding visuals that delight the player, and when they can help to inform the mechanics, that's even better. Did you know that board games frequently start without a theme, and a publisher may pick a design prototype and then figure out the art that fits?
#3 - An Obvious Core Conflict
Here's something where many other games fail: an immediate tension emerges from Suika's core mechanics. What's a “core tension”, you may ask. I'd define it as such: to be compelling, any choice-based game must present a strong duality, with two sides at odds, and put the player in charge of pushing the system towards the “winning” side. If there's no clear right & wrong, players may do stuff, but they won't feel strong emotions. It doesn't mean that every action has to give immediate feedback, there can be long-term goals & strategies, but there needs to be at least a good correlation between the player's actions and the desired outcome.
The typical duality in many game genres is the conflict between life & death, but here, the watermelon game has another: chaos vs order. To win, you must position fruits in the correct sequence: if you intertwine another fruit, the ones that should merge will never touch (thus feeling the space for nothing). Despite physics, it's a mostly stable system: nothing will move unless you do something. After each fruit you add, you can tell whether you contributed to bringing order (i.e. you merged it or you're about to merge it) or chaos. Playing this game feels rewarding because you're constantly contributing to a raging battle, and every step of the way, you ask yourself: “Am I winning or losing?”
#4 - Meeting & Breaking Expectations
Mentioning “chaos” naturally leads us to the next point: the use of physics in the game. The principles are simple: it's only 2D discs reacting to one another, and it's ideal to fulfil its role in the experience: being predictive, yet sometimes a little bit surprising. Achieving this balance is more important than it seems at a glance, and when you play one of the clones, you can intuitively feel how the differences in physics tuning impact the experience.
Humans are reasonably good at estimating how two balls bounce against one another without needing a Physics PhD. Since our baby years, our brain has conditioned us to enjoy when we can correctly anticipate something and see it unfold. When you finally get that big chain of merging fruits, you're not surprised but still enjoy it: we're still inside the kids laughing at their parents doing peek-a-boo.
However, making the game too easy to predict comes at the risk of making it dull. What separates the watermelon game from 2048 is the little dose of variation the physic allows: a minor imprecision can lead to unexpected outcomes. It frequently happens when fruits merge and push one another: whether you get a good or bad surprise, you feel an extra dose of emotions.
#5 - Pacing & Randomness
On breaking expectations, there's another interesting difference with 2048: the fruit you get to drop isn't always the smallest but any of the first five. In 2048 terms, that's equivalent to getting tiles from 2 to 32, and it's a smart design choice to reduce “spamming” and shorten the duration of a game. The goal of Suika is to organize the fruits; what's the point if they are already? In a game that strives for predictive output, having a little bit of input randomness is ideal for renewing the challenge & keeping you focused.
But wait, from what I experienced, it seems that the sequence of fruits isn't completely random: when you get a smaller one, you frequently see another of the same type or the one right above. By manipulating the odds, the game still maintains a good pacing: each fruit is a challenge, but some are easier than others. Indeed, input randomness is a plus for strategy, but if it's too chaotic, it gets frustrating & counter-productive.
Final Point
Does clever design pay off? Well, the company reported having sold three million copies on Switch alone, and since they keep topping the charts, they're on their way to gaining a lot more. Did copycats on mobile & PC cannibalize the sales? It may be counter-intuitive, but those probably boost the popularity of the concept & help to spread the watermelon craze. In a way, the clones act like a free demo, and they aren't going to make millions with no monetization but a bunch of ads anyway.
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