We recently released our new game Zombie Zone to decent success so far. After letting the algorithm figure out what to do with us for a few weeks we have been averaging 200+ CCU for the past couple days which we are super happy with. However we obviously want to continue to grow, and our main area that we seem to be lacking in is D1 retention, but our D7 retention is solid, which indicates to me that our onboarding is somehow messed up.
I have tried a bunch of things to improve onboarding but it’s still not great, and I am unsure of what to do to fix it. We don’t have a guided tutorial because I assumed our gameplay would be intuitive enough to most players (Zombie Uprising has no tutorial and is the biggest zombie game on the playform), but I wanted to see if I could get opinions from people who have played games in this genre to see what they think.
What do you think is lacking in our onboarding process, and do you have any suggestions on how we could improve it?
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I immediately see a problem with this when I joined, and yiu said it yourself, no tutorial. There is way too much going on for me and I feel like it would be better to teach the player what everything means when joining.
I would add some sort of tutorial to explain what to do and what everything around the player is, hope this helps!
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I see what you mean. I can definitely do that and see how our onboarding improves. I just don’t understand how all the other major zombie games manage such high CCU and (apparent) success with no tutorial. Oh well, we can give it a try and see if that improves things. Thanks for the input!
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Ok so, I compared it to Zombie Uprising and there are a few differences in favor to Uprising,
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Big green button that says Play on top
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Easy to understand gameplay and graphics
And the main one is word of mouth, whis is how it got to where it is right now (I actually havent heard about Zombie Uprising until now lmao)
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Yeah you have a good point, uprising’s gameplay loop is overall a bit simpler and has less going on. I will work on a tutorial and try to post here if I see improvements from it. Thanks again for your feedback!
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You’re welcome! And good luck on your game!
Just as a bump / update, I implemented a tutorial several days ago which teleported new players to a solo tutorial place and showed them the basic mechanics of the game, how to purchase new weapons, upgrade weapons, etc. This caused a massive drop in session time and D1 retention. Players obviously did not enjoy being teleported or having to play solo for the tutorial, so I added a context-based tutorial to the main experience which showed players the basics as they played through the game normally with other players. I also updated the core gameplay loop to not have as many intermissions and therefore less downtime. This has shown improvements in session time and some improvements in D1 retention, but it’s not nearly enough to put us within benchmarks.
Our benchmarks were updated yesterday to compare us to “similar experiences” rather than genre and now everything is even lower… I am kind of at a loss for what to do.
I don’t understand how Zombie Uprising and other zombie games assumedly get 20+ minute session times when we can barely break 14 minutes…
