I work on a game mainly put toward children, ages 9-12 is our prime age range in players.
The game is sitting at 12 million visits, but barely striking above 300 players, while in the past was reaching 1k on average daily. For any other developers working on a mainly child demographic game, do you have any tips to increase the time the game is played? As well as to keep the same recurring people coming back to playing the game.
In my suggestion, what engages kids more is varieties of pets such as ones you couldn’t actually have as pets in person such as penguins.
When I first joined I noticed a slack in the general User Interface,
My advice is to make it cartoon based UI and over all in the cartoon look as kids tend to play low-poly cartoony games.
Note: I only played your game for a few minutes, my bad if things in this list are already in your game
The main goal here is to give a reason for players to return.
When I joined your game the first thing I noticed is it isn’t very friendly to new players, they’re stuck on what to do and where to go. Consider adding a tutorial at the start for new players or go the extra mile and incorporate starter quests so the player not only gets a feel for the game but they can also rack up in-game items or currency.
Another thing I noticed is [most] of the morphs are given to you as soon as you join. You could add a sense of progress and make some pets unlock-able by the amount of time you spend in the game.
Leaderboards can help too, but I don’t really think it suits your genre
When I joined, I saw someone in the chat saying “how do i get a pet??” I didn’t see like anything on how to play when you join the game, yes It’s in the game description but when you say 9-12 year old’s they don’t care about the game description. They see a game and say “Hey that looks cool” and just press the play button, something like that should be inside the game. Also when I saw “pet street theater” I expected it to look something like a theater not a big black box saying “pet street theater” Also most of your players just hang around the spawn area and don’t go anywhere else, you should have activities that have players all around the map like mini games or something. Also nobody really goes to the zoo and there should be something to have them actually go there and not make it a waste of space, basically you should just put some mini games around the map that gives prizes or have like little things to do. Something like that to keep younger peoples attention by giving them things to do in your game.
When targeting children audiences, keep in mind children have short attention spans and limited knowledge (and of course shouldn’t be exposed to adult material).
Like others have said, there’s no directions on how to play in-game, which confuses children, who expect directions to be told directly instead of being figured out. Try adding a simple tutorial for new players.
The game can get boring, as all you do is walk around as all sorts of animal species and use your imagination to roleplay, while you earn money automatically and spend them on cosmetics. Try adding more interactivity, such as minigames, and quests to keep the players engaged, and fill the attention span of youngsters.
I do like the kid appeal of blocky animals and low-poly world. If the blue aura over the screen is intentional, I have to say it looks quite sad and children usually don’t like sad things. Try to make it more yellow or white (happy) like Adopt Me!.
