Sound Design and Match 3 Daily (and Why it Doesn’t Have Audio Yet)

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a sound designer by trade. You might then expect that working on audio for this project would have been one of my top priorities. The truth is, part of the appeal of this project was getting to focus on things other than sound production. I spend most of my waking days thinking about audio. I love my job, but I also generally just enjoy games and working purely on software development. A project like this gives me an opportunity to think more about pure game design and technical challenges. And to be blunt, the game doesn’t need sound, at least not right now. I’ve mentioned before that I’m planning on porting the game to Android; for me, that’s where a sound pass makes the most sense.

User expectations are different when you’re actively choosing to play through an application. Match 3 Daily is a website first, and having audio start playing automatically feels a bit like old web design. On the other hand, with an application, having full audio support is expected. It also gives someone a reason to grab the app if they want a more immersive experience than what the web version offers.

Of course I’ve thought a lot about how I would approach the sound for the game. The whole design is very understated, so the sound would have to be as well. Tile swap and pop sounds would need to feel satisfying (and importantly not annoying). Also, compared to other match 3 games, popping sounds would generally feel more neutral; matching more than 3 tiles at once isn’t always the right move in this game, so a more celebratory sound based on the amount of tiles cleared in a match would be misleading.

There’s a real opportunity here to make a very satisfying auditory experience. Music is the most obvious place to start. You think of a game like Balatro: it has a single song and yet somehow it can just keep going and going and not grate on your nerves. Part of that is because they play with game states in the music design, so it’s more dynamic and constantly changing. The speed changes when you lose, the mix changes when you enter a shop, and the sound effects feel like a part of the track.

Those are all things I’m going to want to consider when I start working on the audio for the game. Sound production was my hobby before it became my living, it’s a skill I know I can bring in when it actually matters. But before I invest more time into audio, I want to reflect a bit and see how people respond to the game in its current form. That’s a large part of why I started documenting the development of the game as well. When I start writing about things it gives me a chance to second guess my own ideas and assumptions.

And on another level, why am I building this? Why Match 3 Daily?

A year and a half ago I released my first game, ZOMBETES. It’s a text-based survival game where you play a type 1 diabetic trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. I put a huge amount of work into it, from the pure technical challenge to the design, writing, sound and music. It was a personal passion project, so I was OK with the idea of making something in a niche category like that because really it was just about expressing something, and publishing my own game on my own had been a lifelong dream of mine. To that end it was a success, and I actually earned more from the game than I expected to. It’s still not complete, but at the beginning of the year I decided that I wanted to take a bit of a detour before going back to it.

So Match 3 Daily for me is an idea I came up with after seeing the success of other daily games and thinking about a different game in that framework that I would personally enjoy playing. When you make a game, of course you want other people to play it. ZOMBETES is somewhat on the opposite end of accessibility compared to Match 3 Daily. It requires a bigger time investment to fully get into what the game offers, whereas with Match 3 Daily you can just open up a website and start experiencing the game immediately. It’s just a lot easier to market a game like that because there’s less you need to do to make a value proposition. The game speaks for itself. Everybody knows what the daily puzzle format is, and you’ll know after a couple of minutes playing whether or not it’s the kind of brain teaser for you.

There’s also just less development work involved to get something like this up and running. ZOMBETES took me a year to make something that I was ready to share with an audience, Match 3 Daily took me a week, and to get it into the shape it is now it took me about two months. And the great part is that I’ve created it in a way where as time passes, day by day there’s more to play, with little to no intervention needed on my part. I could die tomorrow and Match 3 Daily would continue generating puzzles so long as someone pays my domain fee.

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You can check out ZOMBETES here on my Steam page. Otherwise, give the soundtrack a listen on YouTube here.