Smashies - a new game by Plexonic built with SALTR
Image Courtesy of Plexonic
On Dec 1st 2017 Plexonic released Smashies, having WHAT (games) as a publisher. Smashies is physics based arcade game, where the player goes through various obstacles smashing glass items, collecting gems and unlocking new characters. The game was developed using SALTR from the beginning of the project. That’s why we decided to visit Plexonic’s HQ and ask a few questions to their game producers.
Our host is Marina Kartashyan, Game Producer at Plexonic, working in the industry for more than 7 years.
Marina, thank you for hosting us at your HQ! My first question would be about level design. Smashies do have significant amount of levels that have pretty complex structure. How did SALTR’s Level Editor cover your needs while designing those levels?
Thanks for coming up! Smashies indeed has a large set of complex leves. It was the first time we have used SALTR for a physics based title. The Level Editor didn’t let us down at all. Our previous experience with SALTR’s level editor was mostly related to Match-3 games. It was a game changer for us to switch to this real-time level editing concept. For Smashies it performed as well as for match-3 titles.
Why you decided to use SALTR’s Level Editor instead of creating your own in-house tool?
Well, most of the game dev companies always create a special level editor for each new title. We find it rather wasteful. Once we tried SALTR’s web based solution, it was clear that anything made by ourselves would be miles behind what SALTR can offer.
Image Courtesy of Plexonic
Another great benefit for us is the privilege of having a single universal level design tool for each game we make. Our Level Designers team doesn't need to adapt to new tools for each new project, and keep working their favorite environment.
SALTR allows creating variants of any content, including levels. Is your team making different complexity variants for specific levels?
Yes! This is one of our favourite features! Balancing level complexities is one of our most difficult and time consuming jobs. It is done during development stage and after release of the game. So basically almost anyone in the industry, including us, are crippled with this never ending cycle. It is so hard to deliver modified levels and measure the results over and over again.
With SALTR this become simplistic task of duplication, editing and publishing - all done in a few clicks. Seeing and analyzing fail rates on a sequence of 1000+ levels suddenly became quite a simple operation for us.
Image Courtesy of Plexonic
Not only that, we are actively targeting different complexity variants to specific user segments, and A/B testing level changes without any interference of our dev team.
How easy your team got the SDK integrated?
Our dev team didn’t have any issues, and it was done in a few hours. SALTR customer care is also very responsive to our questions and requests. If something comes up we know we will get swift response, which is very important for us to not fail our sprints.
We thank Plexonic for this visit and looking forward to next amazing games made by their team using SALTR.