The Royal Crush: Analysis of Match-3 Mechanics

Match-3 games are a hugely popular genre of video games, with games like Candy Crush or Royal Match getting millions of downloads and generating revenues of multiple million U.S. dollars per month. These games come in many different forms, with different playstyles and core mechanics, but all share the basic goal of matching pieces to make them disappear. In this paper, a toolkit for the creation of Match-3 games using the Godot Engine is presented, implementing a variety of common mechanics found in many such games. This toolkit was used to conduct a study on the difficulty arising from the deployment of different mechanics. The results are presented and discussed to gain insights into the level design tendencies of Match-3 Games. It is found that games using the swapping control type are generally more difficult than games that use the collapse control type, as well as that the number of special pieces used, influences the difficulty, and a lower amount of special pieces should be used in earlier levels to properly balance the difficulty of these games.