Heyo! When you’re looking at “hooking” players and generally player retention, you have to consider the first moments of a player’s experience when joining your game. You seem focused on treats, however in reality the first thing a new player sees when joining the game is a 19 page tutorial! There isn’t anything wrong with having this little booklet open through the menu-button you already have, however for the majority of players this way of explaining the game to them is very overwhelming.
My recommendation would be to forego showing them this pamphlet when they join and instead give them a less descriptive, interactive tutorial in which you walk the player through the steps of your gameplay loop. This form of tutorial is much more suited to getting players immediately into the gameplay and has no tradeoff as the gameplay formula you’re going for should already be very familiar to players and doesn’t need a very wordy tutorial.
That being said, I’ve also got some tips for once your players have gotten hooked and now you need to retain them!
Quality of Life
- Display how many treats a player receives whenever they pick one up.
- This gives players a slightly more interactive and tangible sense of their progression.)
- Reduce the time it takes to dig sparkles up from 4 sec to 2 sec.
- The current length for this prompt is needlessly long and slows down your gameplay loop by adding an element with no interactivity and no animation etc.
- As @centraltrains mentioned,
This could be pretty easily lessened by lowering the opacity of your barriers, to give less of a “boxed in” feel without having to entirely re-make your map. The ideal solution would be to rearrange your map into a more linear or organic format, however I understand that for a 1 person project, this isn’t always possible.
To add onto this, you might want to consider prompting players to purchase the next area when they touch the barrier, rather than having to travel to a button at the center of each wall. At the moment it just serves to make the system feel more cumbersome and adds more unnecessary downtime that risks losing your player’s engagement.
Lastly, I’d like to touch on what I personally see as a major issue with the progression design of your game, in hopes that you might be able to improve player retention.
Charm Boxes
- With the current way that you handle progression, players are forced to spend a lot of time searching for the upgrade boxes without any direction. This is particularly impactful because there are no landmarks or pointers towards these boxes but they are crucial to your game’s progression system.
- The charms from these boxes are often very un-impactful and often times feel like they are a drop of water in the bucket when you’re looking at the big number you need to progress.
- There isn’t really incentive to progress to new areas aside from these boxes.
- Teleports have very little return on their cost. The amount of time you spend collecting enough bones doesn’t feel like it is worth the time saved through teleporting (especially considering there is little incentive to leave the area you are currently in.)
My solution?
- Consider reworking your gameplay loop to include a “hub” area. In this hub you could include all of the boxes your game currently holds, as well as teleports.
- Make treats in better areas worth more. I’m not sure if you already have this implemented as the amount recieved from treats varies a lot, but this would give more incentive to progress into new areas. Maybe give them a visual indicator such as changing the colour of their sparkles.
- Change charms from static (+1/+2/+3 etc.) into percentage increases. Considering you can only equip three charms maximum and that their static values aren’t very impactful, this will make them feel a lot more useful regardless of the tier while still letting higher tiers be better overall.
With these solutions combined, your gameplay loop becomes a lot more defined, where players are expected to go out to collect treats and bones, then come back to the hub area to purchase their upgrades and progress. For most players, this is a much more engaging form of gameplay loop and gives them a solid sense of direction where they always know what to do next, hence they are more likely to keep grinding toward their goal. Then, of course, they get a lot more use out of their purchased teleports because saving them the effort of going between their zone and the hub only becomes more valuable as they progress as it provides a tangible benefit to their progression. The faster they can collect, the faster they are progressing!
Hopefully this advice gives you some idea of the issues you’re looking for!
Cheers,
Noire
(P.S. increasing the density of treats and lowering their value makes things more engaging 
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As well as that, can you also tell me how to hook players when they join? That would be super helpful! Thank you!
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