How did Playrix create new Gardenscapes elements? A look at the 2017 design process, from dozens of early ideas and prototypes to visual design and placement in levels.
When a new element appears in a Gardenscapes level, most players think about two things: how it works and how to clear it. But behind that small object on the board is a much larger design process.
In 2017, Alexander Shilyaev, then a leading game designer at Playrix responsible for the match-3 side of Gardenscapes, gave a presentation at White Nights St. Petersburg explaining how the team approached the creation of new elements. The presentation offers a rare look at nearly the entire process, from a rough idea to a mechanic ready to appear in actual levels.
And that process was far more rigorous than simply coming up with a cool obstacle and putting it in the game.
Gardenscapes Constantly Needed New Ideas
At the time of the presentation, Gardenscapes was still in the early years of its mobile era. According to Shilyaev's figures, the 2016 soft launch featured 16 mechanics across roughly 300 levels. By June 2017, the game had grown to 29 mechanics and about 1,300 levels, putting increasing pressure on the level-design process as new mechanics were added.
The team was trying to introduce roughly one or two unique mechanics with each update. That created an obvious challenge: as the game grew, it became harder to come up with something genuinely new that still felt like Gardenscapes and worked with everything already in the game.
So creating a new element did not begin with artwork. It started much earlier.
Stage 1: Start by Looking at What Already Exists
The first step Shilyaev describes is studying other match-3 games.
At first, that might sound a little surprising. Why would a major developer like Playrix begin designing a new mechanic by looking at competing games?
The reason was simple: match-3 was already a mature genre. Many ideas had been tested in different games, in different ways, with different results. Ignoring all of that experience would mean reinventing the wheel every time.
But the goal was not to find something and copy it. Shilyaev describes a process of analysis. An interesting idea from another game had to be studied, understood, and then considered in the context of Gardenscapes.
The important questions were:
- Why does it work?
- What kinds of decisions does it create?
- Would it work in Gardenscapes?
- Does it fit the way Gardenscapes levels are designed and played?
A mechanic can work extremely well in one game and still be completely wrong for another.
Stage 2: From 20–30 Ideas to Just a Few Candidates
Once the research was done, the team moved into idea generation.
According to Shilyaev, they could come up with more than 20 or 30 initial concepts for new mechanics. That did not mean 30 elements were actually entering development. At this stage, the ideas were intentionally rough.
They were collected in a shared document, and then the filtering began. Weak ideas were dropped while the more promising ones moved forward.
The key question was not simply whether a mechanic sounded interesting. It had to make sense within the specific systems of Gardenscapes.
There is a big difference between a good idea and a good idea for Gardenscapes.
The game already had its own match-3 identity, bonuses, board behavior, and pacing. A mechanic might be original on paper but still clash with those systems so badly that the game would no longer feel like Gardenscapes.
Shilyaev specifically discusses mechanics that could block too much of the board or interfere with effects in ways that changed the overall feel of the game.
After the first round of filtering, specialists reviewed the surviving concepts and narrowed the original list down to roughly two or three mechanics with the greatest potential.
That step mattered because once prototype development began, real development time and resources were involved. Rejecting a concept while it was still just an idea in a document was much cheaper than discovering its problems after it had already been built.
Stage 3: The Prototype Shows Whether the Idea Is Actually Fun
The two or three ideas that survived were turned into prototypes.
This was where a mechanic had to prove that it actually worked in gameplay, not just on paper.
A prototype could answer questions that were almost impossible to settle in a design document:
- How does it interact with regular pieces?
- How does it react to matches?
- What happens when power-ups are used near it?
- Does it work properly with existing elements?
- Does it create interesting decisions?
- Is it fun, or is it simply frustrating?
That last question matters. A mechanic can sound great in theory because it introduces a new challenge. But once people start playing with it, the team may discover that it does not create any meaningful new choices. Instead, it may simply cost players moves or slow the board down.
The prototype made that difference visible before the team committed to a finished version.
Only after the gameplay had proven itself did the next major question become important: what should the player actually see on the board?
Stage 4: The Visual Design Has to Explain the Rule
For Shilyaev, designing an element's appearance was not simply about making it look good.
Players would eventually have to identify and interact with that object on a crowded board, so its appearance needed to communicate as much as possible about how it behaved.
If an object is fixed to a specific tile, its design should help the player understand that it will not move.
If it has a special function, it needs to stand out enough to signal that it matters.
If it reacts to a particular type of interaction, the visual design should support that behavior as clearly as possible.
In other words, the artwork was not just decoration. It also had to help teach the mechanic.
The Element Also Had to Feel Like Gardenscapes
Playrix faced another constraint: the game's setting.
Gardenscapes is built around gardens, homes, and familiar everyday objects. According to the presentation, match-3 elements needed to fit naturally into that world.
That limited the team's artistic freedom.
An abstract fantasy object might communicate a mechanic perfectly, but if it looked like it belonged in a completely different game, it would feel out of place.
The team therefore looked for objects that could reasonably exist in Austin's world while still being easy to recognize on the board.
Visual Clarity Was Part of the Gameplay
A new Gardenscapes element never appears in isolation. It sits alongside regular pieces, blockers, power-ups, and other mechanics.
That meant the design also had to work within a real game board.
Shilyaev discusses factors such as color, size, and level of detail. An element should not blend into everything around it, but it should not dominate the board so completely that everything else becomes visually secondary.
This has a direct effect on gameplay. If two mechanics look too similar, players may waste time figuring out what they are looking at. If an important obstacle does not stand out enough, they may fail to recognize the board's real objective until it is too late.
Visual design and gameplay were therefore closely connected.
Stage 5: The New Element Has to Enter the Game at the Right Time
Even after the mechanic works and its visual design is complete, the job is not finished.
The next question is when the player should encounter it.
New mechanics had to fit into the overall progression of the game. Introduce too many too quickly, and players do not have enough time to learn them. Space them too far apart, and levels can start to feel repetitive.
Playrix therefore studied how often new elements were introduced and compared that progression with the structure of other major match-3 games.
A mechanic could not simply be added somewhere. It had to appear at a point where it could bring something fresh to the player's progression.
The First Level With a New Element Has a Different Job
When a mechanic first enters the game, its introductory levels cannot be designed the same way as later levels.
The player first needs to understand the basic rule.
If the first encounter is too complicated, players may not know whether they are losing because they made a bad decision or because they still do not understand how the new object works.
That makes the introduction itself part of level design. Tutorial text or an animation can help, but the board also needs to give players a chance to see the element's behavior in action.
Then the Combinations Begin
Once players understand the basic rule, the real potential of a mechanic starts to emerge through its interactions with existing systems.
An element that creates only a handful of interesting situations on its own can become much more versatile when combined with different layouts, objectives, or other mechanics.
That is why the value of a new element cannot be judged simply by how difficult it is.
What matters more is how many different gameplay situations it can create.
As new elements become more complex, a strong mechanic still needs to work in many different situations without changing its basic rule. The same object might be the main obstacle in one level and just one piece of a larger puzzle in another.
From 30 Ideas to One Mechanic
If we condense the process Playrix described in 2017, it looked roughly like this:
- Study other match-3 games and analyze ideas that have already been tested.
- Generate dozens of initial concepts, often more than 20–30.
- Filter those concepts according to the specific needs and systems of Gardenscapes.
- Select two or three mechanics with the greatest potential.
- Build prototypes to see how they actually behave in gameplay.
- Create the visual design around the mechanic's rules and the world of Gardenscapes.
- Check visual compatibility with pieces, bonuses, and other elements.
- Introduce the mechanic into level progression and develop different ways to use it.
This is the process Shilyaev described in 2017, so it should not be taken as confirmation that Playrix follows exactly the same pipeline today. Even so, it offers a rare look at how Gardenscapes match-3 mechanics were created during a period when the game was expanding at an enormous pace.
Why This Still Matters for Gardenscapes Today
Gardenscapes has moved far beyond the 29 mechanics and 1,300 levels mentioned in that presentation. That makes the 2017 process even more interesting from a historical perspective.
Every new mechanic now has to join a game with years of existing content behind it. As the number of elements grows, it becomes harder to create something different enough to feel genuinely new without losing the design language that makes it feel like Gardenscapes.
And that may be the most interesting lesson from Shilyaev's presentation: the element players eventually see on the board may be the survivor of dozens of ideas that never made it that far.
The real work was not simply coming up with a new mechanic. It was figuring out which idea was actually worth bringing into Gardenscapes.
Source
This article is based on a presentation by Alexander Shilyaev of Playrix at White Nights St. Petersburg 2017 and the written version of his talk about creating levels and new match-3 elements for Gardenscapes.
Playrix: Experience Creating Levels and Elements for Match-3 – App2Top
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