Xavier Agulló

In 2012 “Candy Crush Saga” took the world of mobile gaming by surprise. Multiple similar games were successful around that time, “Puzzle & Dragons”, “Farm Heroes Saga”, “Monster Busters”, etc. It seems that the mobile medium is a perfect match for swipe mechanics and light brain teasers. Back then all designers wanted to come up with new puzzle mechanics, in search of the holy grail of mobile gaming.

A few years later I was obsessed with “Spooky Pop”, a game by Supercell that was soft-launched but never fully released, and I decided to try something of that sort. I thought of different mechanics and I prototyped a couple of them with Game Maker.

Once I thought the concept was solid enough (spoiler: it wasn’t) I got in touch with three friends from university that were running an animation studio back then. Later joined a developer who was a common friend of ours, this way we created a very talented team …if somewhat unbalanced, with three artists, one designer, and a single programmer.

The game never reached very far, because coordinating a team of 5 people who collaborate in their spare time it’s almost an impossible task and we moved very slowly. Understandably, different people had different levels of motivation and energy to tackle this venture. And the worst is that I found myself doing documentation, meetings and emails instead of being hands-on in the game. All of a sudden this project “for fun” resembled too much like work, but with far more precarious conditions. And last, but not least, I also had the looming impression that the game wouldn’t turn out as fun as I expected.

The puzzle mechanics were truly novel and for that I’m very proud, and the art and aesthetics were truly special too. But “different” is not enough to succeed as a game needs to be not only “different” but also “better” than the established proposals out there.