Hi. I don't mind the criticism. And I asked you to BLOG about my game, not rave about it. So I can't complain. But I do have to defend my game so here is what I wrote on your blog: Thanks for the writeup. But it seems like you were writing about the help system instead of the game. I guess that was your agenda… You had a topic. "The Importance of The Onboarding Phase of a Game". Then you used my game as a case study. I don't think of TOT's rules section as a tutorial because it wasn't intended to take the player's hand and lead him through the game. It was meant to be just a reference. And actually I never expected many players would really really those rules (and many don't) in this age of limited attention spans and impatience. I put them in as a source of reference for more serious players who may be hung up in the game and wanted clarification of some point. Also you can leave those rules at any point (and come back to where you left off) and jump right into the game by just tapping the line at the very top of the screen that says "TAP IN THIS AREA TO TURN HELP OFF OR ON". Apparently you didn't read that. Also you only played the demo version on the website (This is my fault because it is not mentioned on the website that it is a limited demo version of the game). The actual game has more turns: 18 for the small board, 20 for the medium-sized board, and 30 for the large board. Also I didn't think you would write this before getting the actual game. As I recall (I actually did forget) I was going to get to you a Mac and/or iPad version for review, and you told me to hold off until you got an iPad. So I was waiting for that...and then forget all about this. You are right about my saying that "It was very important to me for TOT to be a very pure and simple game that didn’t need a rule book" and then I kind of went back on what I said by supplying walls of text of rules. Yes, that’s true but I put them in there for the people who want them no matter how simple a game is. There are some out there who want that. So my mistake was not only in the presentation of those rules but also in trying to make everyone happy which is impossible. One thing I didn't want was an interactive tutorial like a lot of those freemium mobile games which is just a bunch of messages saying "tap here". I didn't want that for a few reasons: 1. Not justified for the type of game. 3. Not enough time. 4. Not economically feasible. (Actually I did consider making an interactive tutorial but it would have taken me a few months to do it and what's the use if only few people followed it. I thought if the game happened to get popular enough then such a tutorial may be economically justified and I could add it in an update. Now I know some might say "Well if you want the game to sell well then you should invest the time before you release it." or "It's not selling due to the lack of a tutorial". Well, that's a chicken or egg type of thing and there is such of thing in this high-speed internet age as "minimum viable product". You put something out there to see if it has a chance. If it looks like it may be successful then you improve and update it with more features. And if the product looks like it won’t be successful, you move on.) One other thing...You wrote: "I was one of the many users who gave the game a shot. However, as many before me I battled with myself to finish reading the first lines of explanations and rules..." and "So, let’s see what it took away from the people who gave up on the game:" Where did you get this information? How many users? And who gave up on the game? Was it a few of your friends? Please back up what you wrote. Anyway, although I think you were slightly bending reality to fit your objectives, you did make some good points about my presentation of the rules. And I'll definitely read yukaichou's article. And your blog is well done and very professional looking. I wasn't expecting this level of sophistication. It's now in my game/ gamedev blog must-read list. Regards, Dan
Promotion Are these blogs intended to promote/can they be promoting the game in an objective way? Sounds interesting. Is the blog popular?
Hi Dan, Thank you very much for defending your point of view. This is what I try to do with the blog: start conversations, give people something to think about and I'm happy you shared your own ideas, because our readers would have gotten just one side of the story. This is something that I'll have to think about in the future. You provided a lot of value already just by mentioning these ideas. The most important thing about a software product, no matter if it's a Software as a Service or a game is to get its AARRR right. It stands for: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue and Referral. Acquisition is how you get people to reach your game. Activation is when you make the player's mind light up because they finally got it! Retention is when the player comes back to your game. Now these three parts are very important for any game and they come one after the other. It doesn't matter if 100 people see your game, if only 10 actually get the hang of it. Because later on, only a few of those 10 people will return to play the game. That's why onboarding is so critical. The idea would be to help as many people as possible (think 70 of those 100) to understand very fast how to play the game and throw them into action as quickly as possible. That way, you'll keep up their enthusiasm and engagement. You are right to ask about the data. We used vague words to describe the part with many people leaving the game, but that is my educated guess, which comes after having seen quite a few metrics regarding product usage at various startups and indie devs. The thing is after people correct their onboarding process they see a huge ramp up in activation. It's different from game to game, SaaS to SaaS of course, so any number given would be purely informative and on Quora for example there are countless examples of such "general metrics" What would be interesting though is for you to tell us if you measure how many people start the game and how many people actually then get to advance through the game. If you have this data it would be amazing! And I agree that you should take it lean with the development of the game. But onboarding plays such a critical role in the success of game, that it would be a shame not to get more people "activated". Regarding the "skip tutorial area": yes, I missed that. Also, I would like the iPad version. As I said, the game is really good. We wouldn't have made such a fuss about it if it weren't. Actually the whole point was to present a case study. I find this problem in all sorts of games: the game is very clever and intriguing, but the way it's packed, you know: marketing, pricing, positioning, onboarding.. they are simply not done right. If you have the data about how many people start playing and how many people continue playing, that would be an amazing contribution! I hope that the article did however manage to make you think about the importance of helping the player learn how to get into the game faster. If you think the game can indeed be played without the tutorial the simplest thing to do could be to just not have it when the game starts and let the player click somewhere on the screen to get it. Of course, this should be A/B tested according to the metrics I specified earlier. All the best and thanks for a great game, Rob
the intention of my blog posts is to start a conversation about game design and maybe we can make better games i'm not promoting anything, I often use popular games as examples, but i also think unknown indies take the most risk, so you have the most to learn from.
Hi Renegadecitizen, I don't know if you find my game interesting enough to blog about, here it is. https://itunes.apple.com/pl/app/id903806337?mt=8
Game is made with Apple SpriteKit framework mainly. Tile Map Editor for levels. http://enanogames.com https://www.facebook.com/pages/Enano-games/338938242832215?fref=ts https://twitter.com/enanogames
Looking for beta testers BTW I am looking for beta testers for The Octagon Theory which Renegadecitizen reviewed: For more infor see: http://tot2.freeforums.net/thread/3/tot-beta-tester
