Behind the Wasteland: Doctor Dust with Andre Villandberg
Bullshark Games takes players into a gritty post-apocalyptic world with Doctor Dust, combining atmospheric collection mechanics with high-octane Grid Boosters and up to 12,000x win potential. CEO Andre Villandberg breaks down how the team balanced feature interactions, tuned the Power Lines multiplier, and built a distinctive slot experience.
What was the main spark or inspiration behind creating the Doctor Dust character and his post-apocalyptic world?
Hello Chase the Scatter readers.
We wanted to create something darker than a lot of our previous releases, and the idea of a plague doctor wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland gave us a lot to work with.
The character and mechanics also fit together naturally. Doctor Dust is essentially scavenging and collecting components from the wasteland, while the player is collecting winning symbols to unlock increasingly powerful Grid Boosters. We always like it when the theme has some connection to what is actually happening in the game rather than simply sitting in the background.
The end result is probably one of the more distinctive worlds we've created so far.
The Collection Bar mechanic feels super natural once you start playing. How did the team balance the math so that filling segments feels rewarding without clogging up the base game flow?
A lot of it came down to making sure the progression was noticeable without having a feature fire on practically every spin.
Every winning symbol contributes towards the Collection Bar, so even relatively ordinary wins can feel like they are moving you towards something. The thresholds then progressively unlock more powerful Booster combinations, which gives the player something clear to chase.
We spent a lot of time playing and adjusting the game because this kind of balance is difficult to judge purely from the math. If Boosters activate too often, they stop feeling special and interrupt the flow. If they take too long, the progression becomes something the player stops paying attention to. We wanted it to sit somewhere in between.
The Power Lines booster can drop multipliers up to 100x on intersecting cells. Was it tricky to tune that specific feature so it did not break the 12,000x max win ceiling too often in testing?
Power Lines was definitely one of the features where the interaction with the other Boosters mattered as much as the feature itself.
A large multiplier on its own is one thing, but if you then have Clone, Switch or Wilds creating a strong connection around those multiplier cells, the potential can escalate very quickly. That's really where Doctor Dust becomes interesting.
So the balancing wasn't simply about limiting how often a large multiplier could appear. It was about modelling all the different combinations that could happen around it and making sure we could still create those crazy moments without the game constantly running into the 12,000x ceiling.
Wilds do not land naturally on the grid and only appear through the Wilds Grid Booster. What made you go with that design choice instead of regular wild drops?
We wanted Wilds to feel like an event rather than just another symbol landing on the grid.
Because they come through the Grid Booster system, they also become part of the progression and interact with everything else that is happening. Getting Wilds after Power Lines have already placed multipliers, for example, is much more interesting than simply having random Wilds appear throughout the base game.
It also keeps the normal grid cleaner and makes it very obvious when the game is starting to become more powerful.
Out of the four Grid Boosters (Clone, Switch, Wilds, Power Lines), which one ended up being the favorite internally during playtesting?
Probably Power Lines, especially because of what can happen after it rather than just what it does on its own.
Seeing good multipliers land is obviously exciting, but then you're immediately hoping that the next Booster does something useful with those cells. When several Boosters activate together and Power Lines comes early in the sequence, you know there is potential for something pretty crazy to happen.
That's really the whole idea behind the Booster system: each one is simple on its own, but the fun comes from how they interact.
If Doctor Dust wasn't busy scavenging glowing toxic barrels on a 5x5 grid, what kind of casual mobile game do you think he would be addicted to playing on his break?
Probably some kind of resource-management survival game. After spending all day scavenging a wasteland for components, I can't imagine him suddenly relaxing with Candy Crush.
Although knowing Doctor Dust, he'd probably spend his break playing a game about surviving another wasteland.
About Bullshark Games
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