Lessons from the beta
The beta for our upcoming casual game is winding down, and the results from the survey were very interesting. I thought I’d share a couple of the results:
Timed vs. Untimed Gameplay: not really surprising, but players overwhelmingly preferred playing the untimed version of the game to the timed version.
Story Didn’t Matter: most beta participants said that the game’s story didn’t matter; it would have been just fine without it. This isn’t necessarily an indictment game stories in general — I mean, our game’s story isn’t exactly super exciting. But it does reinforce the idea that if you can’t do story really well, you probably shouldn’t bother.
Web Features Irrelevant: our game has a feature called the Weekly Web Challenge, which presents players with a new challenge every week. Did they find it boring? Did they find it interesting? Who knows! What we do know is that the vast majority of them did not even try the feature. Apparently that menu item, along with the little explanatory blurb, was so unappealing that people didn’t even want to click on it to learn more.
Other features did get clicked on — people tried the “Challenge Grid” feature, and many people tried both timed and untimed gameplay. But the Weekly Web Challenge was a bust. So we’re removing the web feature and sticking all the downloadable content into the Challenge Grid feature.
This surprised me, just a little. I knew that our target audience would never want to try a web-based PvP feature. They aren’t interested in competition with random strangers. But I thought that they would find the idea of free weekly content updates to be interesting.
And who knows, maybe they would warm up to it after they’d bought the game and played for many hours. But a delayed interest is much less useful to me than a feature that catches people’s interest in the first hour, while they’re still in the trial version.
May 25th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Stories in a casual game like this also suffer because people often start from the beginning level rather than from their last save point for a variety of reasons. Seeing the same story scenes over and over get old no matter how good the story is.