A Match 3 Delight

Available exclusively on Apple Arcade, Garden Tails: Match and Grow is a Match-3 puzzle game that invites players to unlock a series of puzzles to create luscious, beautiful 3D gardens and discover the animals living within them.

As Lead Visual Designer, I worked with our team to take early, abstract concepts and develop them into the final product, focusing on UI, UX, prototyping and optimizing the game for a global release.

We felt the best way to immerse users in a garden when they were playing a puzzle, was to create game pieces and mechanics that represented things you might find while exploring such a place. Releasing our game on Apple Arcade also meant that I was given the opportunity to redesign our UI for an alternate landscape aspect ratio as well as designing for controller support.

Controller integration prototype for selecting a game piece and moving between valid and invalid matches.

One extremely important part of my visual design process is creating prototypes that walk members of the team through UI and UX design decisions I’m considering. These prototypes get handed off to technical, VFX artists and engineers for polish and implementation. I begin making prototypes as soon as possible, even if that means using simple greyscale, geometric shapes to help solve a fundamental interaction or figure out the user experience for a core flow.

Here is a small sampling of some early development, WIP prototypes that were essential to figuring out the game design, UI/UX design and overall product design in Garden Tails.

Early development concept for launching and interacting with items in the requests page (previously known as the catalog).

Test for rewarding level bonuses based on remaining moves.

Dialogue and tutorial concept test.

Concept for surfacing new rewards to a player and drawing their attention to where the rewards are accessed.

Credits

For the full list of credits, please download Garden Tails and view the credits screen.

Game Director
Grant Reid

Art Director
Kati Nawrocki

New Games Management
Tim Sherman

Production Director
David Trammell

Apple Arcade Game Lead
Sandra Honigman

Lead Engineer and Architect
Ra’ad Aldalaq

3D Art and Animation Lead
Ashley Farlow

Junior 3D Artist
Sophia Zapata

Senior Visual Designer
Austin Roesberg

Visual Design
Alicia Feng, Ben Rudlin

Illustration
Alicia Feng

Technical Artist
Shirley Huang

Concept Art
Kati Nawrocki

Senior Game Designers
Kris Horowitz, Toby Sarnelle

Composer/Sound Design
Ross Wariner, Cody Uhler