Updating Bejeweled Is a Puzzling Problem

Adding things to Jewelled is slow, merely adding the right things is much, much harder.

You might conceive that updating a back as "simple" as Bejewelled would constitute a breeze. Let's look information technology, wholly you do is move shiny pebbles around, how hard could it possibly be? Unfortunately for PopCap, that's not the way it works, and in Issue 284 of The Dreamer Blaine Kyllo speaks with PopCap's primary creative officer Jason Kapalka some how the game's simplicity actually makes it more harder to update than something more complicated.

But Jewelled's popularity is difficult because people don't want it to change. Kapalka admits that upgrading it has been difficult. "Information technology's a game that people evidently like in its basic form," he says. "You deficiency to try and keep updating it … but at the same time you don't want to shipwreck it away adding silly things."

PopCap has tried and true to avoid what he believes happened with that other touristed mystifier game. "Tetris would always take these updates," Kapalka explains, "and they'd have some new thing, and the new thing would kinda suck," driving players back to classic style.

The appearance of Bejeweled Twist in 2008 provided the first evidence that whatsoever fans of the franchise wanted the game to rest true to its roots. In Twist, matches are made by rotating groups of gems, not swapping them. Kapalka says it "turned disconnected a lot of people." The trouble was that the rotational mechanic was a "fairly radical change." Spell some players likeable the original dynamic, those who expected to be moving gems far left, right, up and down were upset. Some felt that they had been tricked and betrayed.

Much like reinventing the bicycle, redesigning and updating Bejeweled is harder than information technology sounds, and there's no guarantee that what you create will Be better than you started with. You can read more astir it Kyllo's article, "The Jewel in PopCap's Poll."

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/updating-bejeweled-is-a-puzzling-problem/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/updating-bejeweled-is-a-puzzling-problem/

Share this post