MatchStar 3D

Before anything else could be built, there was a more fundamental question to answer: what creative language actually unlocks a match-3 puzzle game for players? Two directions were worth testing seriously. Narrative — saviour-complex story ads that used emotional hooks and character-driven scenarios to draw players in. And 3D tactile gameplay — creative that put the mechanic front and centre, letting the sensory satisfaction of the match-3 interaction sell the game on its own terms.

Both were viable hypotheses. Neither had been tested against our specific audience and product. The thinking that shaped how we'd generate that volume came from a principle my Head of Marketing brought in — Voodoo's rapid prototyping model. The relevant idea wasn't about game development; it was about creative ownership. Give each person genuine responsibility for their concept from research through to execution, and use speed of iteration as the engine for learning. Rather than committing prematurely to one direction, we chose volume as the primary lever — wide, structured testing across both routes, with each creative treated as a hypothesis rather than a campaign.

The goal wasn't just to find what worked. It was to understand why it worked, and to build a team capable of generating and reading that kind of evidence continuously.

Sustaining high-volume structured testing required an operation that could produce at pace without fragmenting in quality or direction. That meant building several things simultaneously — team capability, production systems, and a creative culture that could hold its own thinking rather than waiting to be directed.

The relationship with the performance team was a significant part of that foundation — and it wasn't immediate. Trust was earned incrementally, through consistent creative quality, through demonstrating that the team could read performance signals and respond without losing direction, and through showing up reliably across a sustained period. As that trust developed, the dynamic shifted from creative and performance working in sequence to working in genuine collaboration — performance insight feeding directly into how concepts were framed and what was worth testing next. That shift took time, but once it was established it changed the quality of decisions on both sides.

On average, the team was producing 10–12 in-house creatives and 12–16 from our vendor partner bi-weekly across the tactile phase. When narrative became the priority, that volume reduced — 3–5 in-house and 6–8 outsourced — reflecting the craft complexity and emotional specificity that character-driven work requires.

The most meaningful shift was in how the motion designers themselves worked. Early on, when asked to research the puzzle game market and pitch their own concepts — 3D and 2D tactile puzzles — the team struggled. Market understanding in a new genre isn't automatic, and the gap between executing a brief and originating a concept is a real one. Rather than absorb that gap at the direction level, I built a process around it.

Designers were given time to research first — watching what competitors were doing, understanding what the market responded to — before developing their own concept. They'd bring that into a timebox marathon session and pitch it to the group, with the performance lead in the room. The review had one non-negotiable at its centre: the match-3 mechanic had to be present and legible, no exceptions. Within that, exaggeration was encouraged and tactile twists were fair game — but the core mechanic was the anchor. Because that standard was explicit and shared, designers could pressure-test their own concepts before pitching.

The conversation in the room became about refinement rather than redirection, and problems got resolved before motion design began rather than during it. The energy in those sessions was high — part confusion, part genuine excitement — and the learning curve was steep. Over time the team developed a genuine feel for the genre, and that feel started showing up in the work.

One contribution that shaped how the whole team produced was reworking the Unity game file for marketing capture. The in-game setup is built for players already inside the experience — for a first-time viewer it reads as cluttered and hard to follow. I adjusted it for audience clarity: tighter framing, reduced object density, UI stripped to essentials, and 60fps recording so animators had the flexibility to time-remap for pacing without losing the tactile feel. I also categorised gameplay objects by shape language, colour, and theme — so content construction had a clear visual logic rather than relying on individual judgment each time.

The motion design system followed the same thinking. Snappy physics felt abrupt and undermined the tactile quality we were trying to communicate, so we established a lighter, more fluid response — weighted enough to feel real, airy enough to feel satisfying. These principles were documented and versioned into the quality guides, which meant the physical language of the gameplay was consistent across in-house and vendor output over time.

Vendor quality was a persistent challenge. The issues were consistent: partners who understood the technical brief but missed the emotional register, iteration cycles that expanded because the brief hadn't been tight enough upfront, and inconsistency of output that took sustained investment to close. The discipline that made it manageable: external partners can only be handed work that in-house already understands well enough to define.

The structured testing phase produced a clear early signal: non-narrative 3D tactile gameplay creative was performing well. The mechanic, when communicated with the right sensory clarity, was compelling on its own terms. That finding shaped the next phase of production and gave the team a clear direction to build around.

Then one concept changed everything. A narrative ad — a dying child and a mother in snow — landed with a signal strong enough to cut through everything the data had been saying. Despite the testing phase pointing clearly toward 3D tactile, this single concept's performance was impossible to ignore. The team moved toward it. That's how performance-driven creative operates: you follow the evidence in front of you, and the evidence had just shifted decisively.

For a period it worked. The team leaned in, optimising around the format and exploring variations. Then, gradually and then quickly, competitors converged on the same emotional register. The concept that had been a breakthrough became an industry template. What had differentiated the game became the category norm, and the signal that had once been clear became noise.

When narrative became commoditised, my response was a staffing decision: I hired a storyboard artist. The team's motion designers were strong, but originating fresh narrative angles at the level the situation required was a different kind of creative problem — one that needed dedicated story thinking. It was the same logic that had driven the Art Director hire on Draw Match: identify the specific capability the work needs, make the case for it, and integrate it without disrupting what's already working.

What that period clarified — and it became clearer the closer we got to the end — was something about the nature of creative-to-product alignment that's easy to miss when a single number looks compelling. The 3D tactile creative had been working because it was aligned end-to-end: the hook matched what the player wanted to do, and what the player wanted to do matched what the game actually was. The signal was consistent across multiple tests. It was a pattern.

MatchStar ultimately didn't survive. The game faced structural retention challenges — a difficulty curve that correlated with IAP drop-off as players progressed — that sat upstream of what marketing could address. The narrative saturation added pressure. The combination was, in the end, decisive.

What I want to be clear about is the distinction between what the creative operation was doing and what the game's commercial trajectory was doing. The team was generating structured evidence, reading it clearly, adapting to what the market was showing them, and building genuine capability as it went. That the market moved in ways that compressed the game's runway isn't a failure of the creative operation — it's an accurate account of what mobile game marketing is. You can be doing the work well and still be operating inside conditions you can't fully control.

The more useful question is what the experience produced — not in terms of the game's outcome, but in terms of the team and the thinking. A creative operation capable of structured experimentation at scale. Designers who had learned to think like strategists. And a framework for understanding creative-to-product alignment that no amount of classroom thinking could have produced. That's what MatchStar left behind.

When Gameberry Labs decided to pursue Draw Match — its most ambitious, highest-stakes creative challenge to date — the team they gave it to was the one that had been built and sharpened through MatchStar. The performance lead, the creative strategist, the storyboard artist, the motion designers who had learned to think like strategists — all of it came from what MatchStar had demanded of us.

That handoff is, to me, the clearest measure of what the MatchStar period produced. Not the metrics of any individual campaign, but the fact that a studio facing a genuinely new kind of problem looked at this team and decided it was the right one to solve it. That kind of trust doesn't come from output alone. It comes from watching a team learn, adapt, and hold its quality through conditions that were consistently demanding.

What I built on MatchStar was an operation — a way of working that could sustain structured creative experimentation at scale, develop the people inside it, and keep producing directional clarity even when the market wasn't giving easy answers. That's what I'd look to build again, in any studio facing a similar challenge.