My game has issues getting new players --- why?

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
,
#1

Hey folks, I’ve been working on a game this past month. I think my game has issues in its on boarding process but I don’t know where. I would like to add visual/audio whatever indicators possible to make actually getting into a ongoing game as smooth as possible.

I’m not sure if the issue is in how the game looks, some bugs I don’t know about, or whether entering the game is just plain confusing/annoying.

I force the user to use one of the games core mechanics (making swords) right off the bat and I hope this reduces confusion, but from the perspective of a younger audience I don’t know if the game is completely intuitive.

The issue comes with entering games. You have to walk through portal AND click a button to enter. This might be confusing. I’m not sure. But some players enter for 1 minute and leave according to dev stats. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I’d like as much advice on this game as possible because I’d really like it to succeed!

Here is the link: https://www.roblox.com/games/3534189497/Sworge-BETA

5 Likes
#2

I think your game is great, and it’s like to dislike ratio isn’t bad. I think that comes from people who would care enough to play the game for more than 1 minute, as you said, though.

Your issue here seems to be in what happens as soon as the player joins the game. You’re forced to forge a cool sword, but there’s no indication anywhere of why/what its used for/what’s going on.

Aside from forging your first sword, when you’re done doing that, you’re just dumped into a lobby looking area. Again, the player gets no indication of what’s going on, what the game about, or what to do. The most I could figure out about the game came from the description, which isn’t a good sign. I think your game has potential, but there’s not a lot that educates new players on what the game is about. And this is coming from the perspective of someone who is not in the younger audience – I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

For forging your first sword, a “tutorial” isn’t necessary - you can leave that pretty much the same as it is now. I would add a UI, though, that says something. Something like “Forge your first sword!”, or something that indicates that the player must click the buttons to forge their first sword, would be very beneficial for this aspect of the game.

As for the second part, what happens after you forge the sword, a tutorial would greatly help new players understand what the game is all about. Avoid making a wall of text. No one wants to read a wall of text/sit through a camera cutscene while a tutorial is being shown. Make it interactive. Prompt the player to do something in game, like visit a shop, then progress the tutorial after the action is done.

In this case, I don’t think its the gameplay that is holding your game back. I think it’s just the fact that new players have no idea what the heck is going on.

I wish you the best of luck with your game, because it looks very good.

8 Likes
#3

Thank you for the quick and thoughtful response. I will definitely create some indicator that you are making your sword (“Forge your sword!” or something of the like). And a good tutorial.

I didn’t really get much feedback on first time experience from testers, well, because they’ve been helping me from early stages and no one really mentioned this stuff so your response is super helpful.

2 Likes
#4

I have played your game for a little bit and have came up with some theories to why your game isn’t retaining and getting new players.

The more clicks you have the more players you lose

At the moment you have to go through a long process to join an arena in your game. Most first time / casual users just want to join a match in your game as quickly as possible with as least confusion as possible. This means you need to support them through this process.

You may think, I will just slap a tutorial in for all new users to go through. This in fact not the best approach to take as you are fixing one problem and creating another problem at the same time. The problem you are creating is you are adding a lot more clicks for the user to go through. Also, whenever you are playing a game and displayed with a tutorial how much of it do you skip? Most of the time users will just spam click the next button without even taking in what it it telling them because they want to play the actual game.

In your case, I think the main reason why users are leaving your game after 1 minute is because they are displayed with a screen with loads of buttons as soon as they join. For a lot of new users this is daunting to them so they decide to just leave. To solve this I don’t think you should display this screen to users as soon as they join the game but instead you should make it an optional thing. You could have someone in the lobby that you go to see when you want to change how your sword looks and when they user first join the game you should give them a default sword.

When I was playing your game, at start with I was very confused to how you join the arena. You should make this process a lot easier. Maybe you should consider putting a play button somewhere on the players screen that prompts them to join the arena. You could make a system similar to how dungeon quest works. Doing this will cut out a lot of the confusion a player may have when trying to find where they can join the arena. Obviously you can still have that portal for players to go through as well.

Players get bored easily

On Roblox there is thousands of games people can play so you need to make your game stand out and engaging so people don’t get easily bored and leave. Also you want players to keep coming back.

One way you can do this is by rewarding players for joining your game each day. I have noticed you have this implemented already but it is sort of hidden from the player. You should display this on the players screen as soon as they join the game and show them what reward they just earned. Also you should display all the other rewards the player can get for each day the join the game. The rewards should get better for each day you join the game as well. You should take a look at how Adopt Me does this.

At the moment your game gets very boring after a while because of how repetitive it is. You should consider adding more arenas for players to go in, maybe unlockable arenas. Maybe add different gamemodes like a team area.

I could go on all day about this sort of thing so you should consider watching these 2 videos from the RDC that explains some solutions to your issue you are currently facing:

4 Likes
#5

Thank you for taking the time to play test and write this up. I will add that play button. One thing I was considering was making the enter arena portal teleport you without having to go through a menu beforehand, but would that be inconsistent with the play button?

As for boredom, I do plan on adding more maps, and there is a TDM gamemode and map/gamemode voting system but you probably didn’t get to use it since the server wasn’t active. I will add more arenas but I don’t want to lock some players out of all the content so they won’t be unlockable.

Thanks again for your transparency, this will be a great help to me.

1 Like
#6

Thinking about it. It’s crazy how obvious this stuff was to me as a player. Now that I’m making games I do all this unintuitive stuff :frowning:

#7

If you do have the play button I would keep keep the menu as that keeps everything standardised. Also having that menu allows you to easily display the different maps to players, if you plan on making this the only portal you go through.

#8

I did just that. I’m going to see how this affects the onboarding process and continue making improvements.

#9

AWESOME! Just from those small changes there has been a huge improvements attracting players. vastqud, waterrunner, anyway to mark two answers as solution? Thanks a lot guys.

Also, I understand the process isn’t perfect yet so if anybody wants to share their two cents I would love to hear it.