How can I make my game feel more fun? Is it currently too hard?

My game is Run, and I’ve been trying to polish it more and more everyday, however the like to dislike ratio seems to be consistently decreasing, but I can’t seem to find out what makes the game feel so unfun.

Looking for advice on what this could be and how I could improve the game overall, or if there’s some major bug I just could not find causing the mass amount of dislikes. Thanks for the help!

4 Likes

Your game is cute!

I like the INSTANT directions you give to players on how to play and get into the main action (IT’S VERY IMPORTANT!).

The graphics are cute and simple.

The main action concept could be stronger though. I have my theory of what mainly makes a game fun, and, in my opinion, your game’s main mechanics need improvement.

The theory is that a game is fun when it encourages you to think (figuring out how to achieve some task), or at least gives an illusion of thinking through stuff.

Another problem is the attention span of most players I think is very short - you got about 30 seconds to catch attention and catch it WELL.

So I RAN through the tunnels for a few minutes and didn’t need to think much (yes, a simplified concept is very good, but there is this thing as being “too easy”).

It’s very simple to avoid obstacles and when i fell, I didn’t lose progress, so it became even more easy, not challenging enough. As I mentioned before, most players play for a few minutes. In those critical seconds/minutes, they get the first stages/levels, and in them, there’s not much to think about. In my opinion, players can quickly lose attention and jump into another game in an instant.

And I think I noticed a minor bug right at the beginning?
The popup dialog at the beginning failed to disappear, also with the accompanying button “run”, letting me spam teleport to the lobby. It’s a minor issue, it disappeared when I entered the first portal, all good.
Tried to upload a video here to show it to you, but apparently, 9 seconds is too much for Roblox :sob:

And another minor issue I encountered is the first time I loaded your game, it told me to click, I did… nothing happened. I would recommend making it easier to get into the game by letting click anywhere on the screen, not only the dialog at the bottom, but it’s not necessary, you got a nice finger pointer showing where to click, but you know… at first join not thinking much, the aforementioned short attention span… :sweat_smile:

3 Likes

Thank you for the feedback, and we had trouble keeping players when all worlds required thinking (So when they were hard) as the game would get mass disliked as players often felt like it was a “Rage game”, so the earlier worlds are made a lot easier to try and improve the Funnels.

But I understand some players want harder worlds, some want easier, so next update will allow players to pick any World of any Difficulty and clearly show the Difficulty rating for each World

And the tutorial dialogue box will be improved as well many thanks

2 Likes
What most people won't tell you... (the hidden truth - when you understand it, you may improve greatly).

The changes you are planning I am skeptical about… you see…

I am going to go deeper, so bare with me…

Stimulating thinking is not necessarily being hard, that’s one of the most common mistakes developers make.

I’ve been there…

I’ve analyzed a lot of games before, studied game psychology and game design for a long time… But I am not a professional game designer, just guessing - be aware that I might be wrong…

Too Easy - Balanced (just the right amount of engagement) - Too Hard

To get in the middle is hard, you need to understand game psychology/game design very well.

And an another issue is that you are adapting a single-player game to Roblox…

So the ultimate success recipe is Encouraging Thinking + Being Social (mostly because Roblox is inherently multiplayer, so you have to deeply tap into that, clearly encouraging social activities in a competitive (for example) game - instant and direct confrontation or cooperation with the other players), so that’s why before I stated that your concept may not be that strong, not to be harsh.

Personally, I would rethink the concept from the ground up, and that is not an easy task.

1 Like