Bob's main purpose in visiting Gastar Electronic Entertainnt was to personally et Takayuki, the man who had helped him imnsely, and thank him in person—while also taking the opportunity to flatter him a bit.
The secondary goal was to see if he could get any hints about upcoming gas or strategic plans.
Ga sales had been gradually hitting a bottleneck, with revenue growth stalling, so he was eager to see if Mr. Takayuki had any new ideas.
And as it turned out—he did.
That alone made the whole trip worthwhile.
As soon as Bob returned to his hotel, he imdiately contacted his U.S. team: "Get in touch with Gastar Electronic Entertainnt right now! They're working on a brand-new mobile ga. This might be the key to flipping the current situation on its head. If any of you screw this up—you're all fired!"
Bob had never been the type to sugarcoat things with his staff.
...
...
He was all about results. If sothing promised big returns, he was all in. But anyone who got in his way? Gone—without hesitation.
anwhile, Takayuki, after Bob left, went straight to the company's mobile ga departnt.
At the ti, it was the smallest of all the developnt teams, as their main job had simply been to port existing gas or develop low-difficulty titles.
Around 300–400 people were enough to handle that.
Arriving at the departnt, Takayuki called a quick eting with the whole team.
Candy Fun Match wasn't a technically complex ga.
The match-3 logic was simple. The main brainwork was in the UI and level design.
This would be where the designers would lose a bit of sleep (and hair).
But thankfully, Gastar Electronic Entertainnt had a massive team.
Takayuki easily pulled in idle designers from other dev teams to support the mobile division.
One designer can only do so much—but what about a hundred? Two hundred?
Takayuki went ahead and summoned every available designer in the company to pitch in.
He first laid out the core design style of Candy Fun Match.
It had to be cute—everything from the UI to icons and cover art had to be round and charming.
Then there was the visual effect of matches.
That "satisfying" feeling after a match had to be nailed.
Since that's a bit abstract, Takayuki gave a concrete example based on his experience with match-3 gas in his original world. He described in detail how the animations and effects should feel, so the designers could understand imdiately.
Next was sound effects and music.
This was the easiest part.
They didn't even need many composers.
Gastar had a massive archive of over a million music and sound assets, collected from past unused prototypes.
These "scrapped" assets weren't low quality—they just didn't fit their original projects.
So they were stored away for future use.
This was another benefit of large-scale developnt—having a deep resource library saved tons of ti.
Takayuki called on a dozen composers, asking them to:
Create new music and sound effects based on his instructions.
Search the archive for fitting tracks and tweak them as needed.
This task was much simpler than designing visuals.
Lastly, ca the ga programming.
Again, not a huge challenge.
Gastar had previously worked on match-3 gas like Bejeweled.
The core chanics were nearly identical. This was just a new take, with enhanced visuals and added features.
Bejeweled had simple chanics and so basic power-ups.
It was already fun—but not quite satisfying.
So Takayuki planned to boost that satisfaction factor.
Add more power-ups to create massive matches.
Compress the average level ti from 5–10 minutes to under 3 minutes.
Most mobile gars played in short bursts—so each level had to be short and snappy.
And as long as there were enough levels, there was no fear of people running out.
In the end, all these components were brought together.
And because the ga was simple and over 500 people were working on it—including testers—it was finished in less than a week.
anwhile, the Facebook team hadn't been idle either.
After Bob gave the order, they imdiately contacted Gastar to get the latest dev details for Candy Fun Match and began a full-scale marketing blitz.
They spent big to launch ads across several top platforms that very day.
Naturally, Facebook itself led the charge, but they also promoted on their video platforms, rental services, and e-comrce platforms.
Buy a subscription to their video service? Get a $10 starter pack for Candy Fun Match.
Place a $10 order on their shopping platform? Get a random item drop worth up to $10 in-ga.
All their internal ad channels worked in perfect sync.
And other ad platforms were just as aggressive.
Facebook and Gastar were loaded with cash, and the ad platforms were thrilled to work with clients like them.
No delays. No drama. Fast paynts. That's what every ad partner loved.
With this kind of marketing power, it was practically impossible not to know that a new ga was launching on Facebook's mobile platform.
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