Brainrot has killed development

So, for the last 9 months me and my team have been developing a Marble Game called For Keeps where you play PVP to shoot marbles at other marbles and you get to keep what you knockout.

Theres also this whole segment that you can go around the map and interact with marbles to get new marbles, aka collecting them.

We recently launched the game and all the players that joined from the ads just stayed there and couldent click the button for {Next} in the tutorial, so they would just end up leaving.

We thought that its too complex so we made it even more simple but players just dident stay more than a minute in the game despite all the stuff we threw at them to do.

So right now im looking for feedback on the game cause every single person that has played told me its a “good game”. Idk if im missing something but good games tend to have players.

But at the same time, games about brainrot get thousands of players on the first day.

Feel free to drop by but if you do, tell me your opinion why this is doing bad.

6 Likes

hey, just checked out your game and the art style is great, but the onboarding currently has too much friction and you need to make it as effortless as possible to get to the fun (shooting at the marbles).

I can share some things I have noticed that you can think about changing:

  • remove the starting how-to-play and play screen entirely, it is very unnecessary and very few players will ever click on how-to-play, especially for younger demographics that even click on ads, they expect you to teach them how to play via good level design and UX

  • The second I join I see a wall of text that takes up a quarter of my screen, Roblox players do not like to read, I’d recommend to remove the wisp bunny entirely and focus on teaching them via icons and very short instructions

  • Honestly I think the best thing you could do is teleport new players into a solo round automatically and let them be able to shoot marbles within 25 seconds of joining

I think the gameplay is fine, so not much comments on that

2 Likes

Well first I do like the art style here, it’s very interesting but I would also say the tutorial’s cinematic sequences are long and irrelevant.

  1. There’s sections that have no use to the game and cannot be skipped
  2. Attempting to shoot the marble during the actual tutorial can be unreliable and the marble can just vanish which creates problems when players try to learn how the game works (It happened the on every attempt to play through the tutorial so I don’t know if it will actually work)

The “Wisp Bunny” doesn’t really explain how the game works when you just press play. You get a simple “Do this” but it doesn’t tell you why you’re doing it or what the point of the game is. There’s no “This is how you win” explanation in the single player mode so learning what your goal is just doesn’t happen.

The text block for the tutorial takes up about a third of the screen which is a little large for a tutorial. That might cause players to feel a little overwhelmed.

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The How to play section ? or the ingame onboarding ?

in the main game you’re able to see the marble trajectory, should add it to the tutorial. The tutorial does have a lot of delay and next buttons so keep all the next buttons at the same position and let people spam it with no waiting for transitions until they actually get to the tutorial.

Tutorial could also do well by only just having 1 section that just plays the game with an ai with you, like:

  1. ai puts marble on the board
  2. player gets instructed how to
  3. ai knocks out the player’s marble and takes it
  4. player knocks out ai marble
  5. ai misses the players marble
  6. player knocks out ai marble
  7. win
1 Like

I find the game easy to understand and play.

Today I’m not feeling okay and I haven’t read a single thing aside following the arrows. It has been just trial and error. I don’t see the friction that the others are talking about.

Even though the production values of the game are excellent and the concept is interesting I don’t find it particularly fun to play. It’s a shame though because I can see there is a lot of hard work there.

My feedback isn’t particulary useful because I’m a 50 year old programmer, not the target audience by far.

Fun fact, I did a game about throwing balls to other balls too that nobody played. At least your game has had some players.

2 Likes

The “How to play” section of the game from the main screen.