Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells is a Match 3 game celebrating the Wizarding World of Harry Potter & Hogwarts created by Zynga available on iOS and Android. More information about the game can be found here.

My Role – Senior Game Designer

I began working on Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells in May 2021 as a Senior Game Designer and remained on the project until March 2025.

While working on the project, I created and reviewed new levels for the main progression track of the game as well as side content features. I designed features for the game including new hazards and updates to existing game modes. As well as assisting with the weekly difficulty tuning of live levels in main progression and side content of our game. In addition I would set up level packs to be created by multiple outsourcing companies, review the deliverables, and approve them.

After the departure of a team member I took over the upkeep of the Club Challenge feature in our game. Club Challenge is a multiplayer cooperative game mode where groups of players progress through a map by completing Match 3 puzzles. As part of upkeeping the feature I would adjust live levels in our weekly tuning release, and collaborated with art and engineering to update the feature to support smaller and larger map variants. I also worked to streamline the map creation process to help reduce dependency on art to create new content for the feature. This led to creating more new maps and updating existing ones to better align with new best practices, and address emergent behavior in our most active clubs.

A similar set of circumstances led to me taking ownership of Character Moments, dialogue events that appear at the start of levels featuring characters from the current scene of the movie. This involved coordinating with art, audio, engineering, and production to create, implement, and record these events for licensor submission with enough time to get approval to match our scene release cadence.

In addition I created tutorials for powerups and new mechanics to help reduce the load on the designer who primarily created them. As part of this work, I helped to create an updated new user experience to increase early game player retention in coordination with engineering.

This past year I assisted with our major initiative to revamp core parts of our game, including updating hundreds of outdated levels in our game to better align with new best practices.