Increasing CCU for non-popular game?

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
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My game, Cleanup Crew, is a passion project i released just a couple months ago, and it’s got a lot of visits from the help of a twitter post and devforum topic, but other than that, it isn’t doing so well. ~7k visits is AWESOME for a small game developer like me, don’t get me wrong, but the CCU is nowhere near where i’d like it.

I know you’re probably tired of seeing posts like this every 3 minutes, but I’d just like some help.

Game currently has:

  • Leaderboards (best time, high score, etc)
  • Multiplayer (game is intended for singleplayer, but multiplayer works well)
  • Some badges (adding more in the future)
  • ~13 levels/maps
  • No gamepasses, just donations
  • Custom round modifiers
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I haven’t played the game yet, so I’ll edit this later when I do, but I immediately have to recommend better thumbnails. Think of it like YouTube videos. Your video needs to stick out and feel clickable. It needs to feel like “the one”, especially when people search for it directly. Looking at the statistics from Steam, users spend very little time looking at a game page before deciding if it’s worth their time or not, even for a free game. So you need to first get them to your game page, and then make the game page look just as attractive. The name is solid though.

Title Screen

  • Title screen is unique, but it’s hard to know what to look at.
  • The mode selection is a bit too “in your face” and hides the other options behind a scroll (one that might not be obvious to everyone).
  • The resolution is also inconsistent.
  • Your advertisement for Smoothie Blitz is also positioned a bit oddly, leaving empty white-space in a strange spot.
  • The “What’s New” section text size is too small.
  • If “Quick Play” is the default, I don’t see an immediate tutorial. I just see a large list of maps that use alphabetical order rather than a suggested order, so I don’t know which one I should even try first as a first-time player.

Gameplay

  • The dragging controls need some work. I had great difficulty moving anything other than the body around.

  • I had a very short amount of time to finish and I was struggling against the game’s physics, and also not knowing what to do (obviously the mentioned tutorial would help with this).
  • It might be good to have a restart button rather than kicking back to the title screen, but it’s not a big deal, at least for single player.
  • The timer is kind of small and hidden in a corner.
  • The timer SFX is a bit annoying and overly stressful. I feel like that sort of thing should be saved for when time is nearly up.
  • Definitely needs some replay value, perhaps some randomization and with larger levels. I like the concept.

I think that’s it for now.

2 Likes
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I’ve never really had major success in terms of getting popular, but I do have some advice.

After checking your game out, I noticed that you have:

  • No gameplay loop
  • No monetization
  • No progression system

I’d imagine that the average players is only going to play for 1 round which would be around 1 - 3 minutes which is horrible when you want to reach the algorithm.
I’d talk about retention, but that matters more when you already have a decent average session time.
Also, when it comes to monetization, although it may be a personal choice to not monetize your game, you’re significantly lowering your potential CCU.

Just to give you an idea about how important these things are, I’ll tell you about two of my games: My basketball game, and my RNG game. Although I just hardly ever updated them, which is the reason they don’t do as well, in terms of retention, monetization, and engagement, they differ greatly.

My RNG game was highly monetized, and gave players a reason to continue playing the game (just simply trying to collect the best cards), which is why it was able to do well while I added new cards to the game. This allowed the game to peak at 300 CCU, and achieve 400K+ visits.

My basketball game on the other hand, has no monetization whatsoever, and not a single ounce of progression. Although I may or may not plan to add these things in the future, this limited the growth of the game significantly, and it was only able to peak at 15 concurrent players, and only achieve 80K visits.

The main lesson here is just to add those 3 specific things to your game, and there are many tutorials available to do so.

1 Like
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thanks for the advice everyone!

i feel like the game does have a gameplay loop (play rounds and try to beat your time or score), but can you elaborate?

definitely agree, what would you recommend i add to the thumbnails? i’m definitely not going for any of the big red circle clickbaity stuff, i think the main thumbnail gets the game’s point across

agree again, ive been trying to get up a tutorial but got caught up in other things. working on it now!

UI design is definitely not my strong suit, i’ve been meaning to revamp it since its an eyesore

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All I can really say is to do research. Look at other games, especially similar ones, see what they do. There’s also plenty of videos and marketing research about thumbnail design, which also takes inspiration from photography. I know it’s a lot, but game development includes many industries that each stand on their own independently. But, you don’t have to become an expert, it’s more just for inspiration and something to learn from. You might even consider testing multiple variations of thumbnails to see what works best. Sadly, I’m not sure if Roblox currently supports AB testing with thumbnails yet, but you can still do it manually. Though the game icon matters the most, so people actually click on it to begin with.

It’s not awful, but it definitely could use a bit of a clean up at least. Just like I said with thumbnails, UI is a whole study in of itself. Just look at some basic overview videos or something. UI and UX design, typography, things like that. It also helps to look at other existing things to get some ideas, but understanding the fundamentals is incredibly helpful in my experience.

I like the concept so far, it just needs some polishing up overall and some dynamic variation to keep the game playable more than just once per map (more than just leaderboards, but those are great as well).

2 Likes
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hey uh guys the game is getting botted

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image308×273 25.2 KB

i just randomly looked and it was at 144 active

edit: i shut down the servers (they rejoined but i shut that down too) and i think they’re gone, but i just wanna know wth just happened???

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Players can chose to have their avatars anonymous when they join a game. It wont show their character appearance besides the normal “noob” outfit. So that could be it… :confused:

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how do you explain 144 people doing that who immediately rejoin 2 seconds after i shut down the server

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broo :joy: , if you shut down the server sometimes roblox automatically makes the ppl rejoin like a soft shutdown

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yeah it makes no sense that there would just randomly be that many people all wearing the same exact outfit, i guess theres a chance they could be actual players

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