Challenge: Reviving my dead (0CCU) game!

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#1

Hey there,

I joined Roblox less than two years ago to make some games, because why not? My first (learning) project Crazy Arena took around 4-6 months and was a complete failure. Low numbers all around, bad player feedback and I wasn’t enjoying it myself, so… I moved on to other projects. Year passed and that zero CCU started getting on my nerves. It might not be a great game, but I feel it deserves another chance!

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So, here’s the deal. Until the end of the Summer I’m gonna use what I learned while making Pipe Dash to update and promote Crazy Arena to push it into Home Recommendations and hopefully see some healthier player numbers. I will use this thread to documment my progress and also collect feedback on the game and my efforts in general.

Gameplay: players run around an arena full of shifting traps to collect most coins before round time runs out. Very basic, a bit lame, but can be fun for a short while. There are a few items and mechanics to gain advantage or troll others.

At the time of writing it has 24.000 plays. For some it might seem like a lot, but most of them are from old sponsored ads and you can read about my campaign results in this thread. There aren’t any more stats to share, because the dashboard is literally empty. The game was getting 10 plays/month, all coming from the developer group. Up until yesterday the game was not even in the search results if you looked for the name without quotes.

Why did it fail? (in my opinion)

  • Confusing game mechanics
  • Gameplay isn’t rewarding
  • Terrible new player onboarding
  • Lack of social features
  • Borderline unplayable on mobile
  • Bland build
  • Bad single-player support
  • Lack of advertising
  • I gave up too soon?

The Plan

I am not going to rebuild the game from scratch or touch the core mechanics, since that would take too much time. The idea is to make smaller changes and polish the parts which might have a bigger impact to player satisfaction.

  • Ordering a professional icon
  • Replacing store images with higher quality thumbnails
  • Cross-promoting (teleport from Pipe Dash)
  • Improving new player onboarding (guides, tutorial, etc)
  • Reworking interface to make the game easier to understand
  • Improving the build (more colors, less crappy textures)
  • Promoting the game on social media (Tiktok, Youtube, Twitter)
  • Running a couple of sponsorships (icon tests and attempt to hook the homepage algo)
  • Improving mobile controls

This thread is already too long and, while it could be more detailed, who wants to read all of that?

I already got some comments that I’m wasting my time with this, but let me know what you think! How would you try to revive a game like that? Any other ideas or suggestions?

And I still need to have a specific goal to make this thread catchier. Realistically, something like 50 average CCU would be a win, but that’s a boring goal.

One million plays by September? :sweat_smile:

5 Likes
#2

Hi, I remember playtesting it =)

At my feeling, goal of rounds was wrong.
I need to collect gold coins to get purple coins after round.
Why not make it so we need to just oulast every other player, or in case of single player, make it “survive for as long as possible” with increasing difficulty.

Then, collecting purple coins at lobby is much more profitable than playing rounds.
Acid tiles look like heal tiles = death

That’s all I remember honestly :sweat_smile:

3 Likes
#3

Will be following this, sounds interesting and good luck! Keep us updated in this thread

2 Likes
#4

Yeah, that’s some great feedback and, honestly, now that I play it again after a long break I can see these flaws much better than before. Reworking currency and point systems is on my mind, but first - I’m gonna rebuild interface and add new player guides.

Big problem with things like poison or troll coin (and even powerups) is that it has very little feedback, so that’s where a lot of confusion and frustrationg comes from. The usable items are poorly integrated and I bet most of the players never try them or forget about them (I know I also often forget to restock).

I think my reasoning against “last man standing” gameplay was that it’s not fun to wait until the end of the round if you die first, but I could at least try it as a separate game mode.

We’ll see :slight_smile:

1 Like
#5

Make ghost players - they can try to survive again but they can’t win anymore in that round.

1 Like
#6

Make Dead Players in which they are dead

#7

I’m gonna give you some feedback on what I think about this game. Honestly I think that it needs a tutorial bad. I didn’t understand what even the point of the game was and I would make that more clear. Also the models are quite in need of updating and please remove the loading screen😭.

In my opinion the game also needs to make it so you don’t respawn and players need to compete on surviving against each other.

1 Like
#8

Why? Do people hate custom loading screens? I will remake it, because currently it’s just an obviously AI image that doesn’t even fit the game well.

#9

Idk sometimes they can be to long and if you are just trying to play a game it’s kinda annoying for some.

#10

I love this game, I love Pipe Dash, and you are an amazing dev. I really look forward to this game becoming better, and I really look forward to every other game you make. Please remember me when you become (more) famous.

1 Like
#11

Time for an update!

While search is unlikely to bring many players in this case, this is important since it helps when promoting the game on social media.

  • Playtime stats (last 7 days)

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This is going to be my main statistic to track. The numbers are pretty bad if we keep in mind that these are “friendly players” that are coming from my social media and other games. They are more likely to give the game more time and look around compared to randoms.

  • Sources

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Nothing unexpected here. Most of the new players are coming from Pipe Dash teleport or developer group. There will be increase in Search traffic over the following weeks, because I plan to stream this game on my Tiktok channel.

  • Development

I made some progress with UI rework, but will post an update when it’ll be finished and polished. It will include nicer looking buttons, clearer game state information, different player/score board, better UI sounds and animations

#12

More progress has been made with UI rework, only a few major parts remain (shop-related). Fixed a bunch of bugs that may or may not be impacting gameplay.

  • Removed air-control
    This was a questionable decision from the start, but what I realized only now, that this was putting mobile players (who don’t jump that often) at a disadvantage. I feel like one way to make game more enjoyable for all the platforms is keeping the pickups lower and forcing jumps using obstacles

  • Paid Advertising
    Ran a full 20 credit sponsorship (aimed at US mobile male players, 0.01 bid) to test the old icon while I wait for the artist to draw a new one. It was nice seeing full servers, but most new players were leaving fast.
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  • Emoji Replacement
    Probably the most important update ever! I replaced :bomb: emoji used in the title with :fire:, because I realized that bomb was pretty much invisible in the dark theme of the site/app. Is that emoji helping at all… I have no idea.

#13

New icon is here! Time to do a Sponsored Ad run and see how it works. Any guesses if it’s going to perform better or worse? So far most of the icons I liked underperformed :smiley:

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#14

Major development

Crazy Arena reached the Home Recommendations and the day before yesterday it had first FIVE players from that source. The current thumbnail is terrible (very basic screenshot) so I will be ordering something as soon as possible, otherwise home page won’t do much good.

It took almost exactly 10k plays, so take that as you will. Could be the magic number, could be a coincidence.