I’ve been working on Steal a Slime, an idle/stealing game where you catch wild slimes, keep them in cages at your base to earn coins, and raid other players’ bases to steal theirs.
A lot of new players (mostly from ads) leave within the first couple of minutes, and many of them never seem to get going. I’m still digging into my join and tutorial funnels, but here’s what I know so far:
Average client frame rate is about 44 fps overall. iOS runs at about 56 fps, but Android averages only about 36 fps, and Android seems to be a big part of my players.
I’ve spent the last few days on performance work (pooling, cutting per-frame work, replacing BillboardGuis with SurfaceGuis), but the live numbers barely moved.
What I’d love feedback on
First impressions: In your first 2 minutes, did you understand what to do? Was anything confusing, boring, or annoying?
Tutorial: Did it help or get in the way?
The hook:
Did anything make you want to keep playing? What would?
Performance: If you’re on a low or mid-range Android phone, how did it run? Any stutters in particular spots?
Ad traffic: For anyone who has dealt with this, how much early drop-off is normal for ad players, and what helped you keep them?
Well, I may be 20 and not at all the target audience for you, but I’ll still give feedback.
It’s a generic “Steal A ___” game. Frankly it’s quite boring.
It doesn’t do much different from anything else. Anyway, here’s some things I noted while playing:
There was little to no slime variance in the pool of slimes to steal. I was seeing nothing but the same 3 slimes. I get rarity is a thing and all but everything beyond the first 3 are too rare. At least on steal a brainrot I can see several different brainrots instead of the same 3.
The UI transitions (index & rebirth) were really slow and delayed, it didn’t feel good at all.
For the index, the transition is unnecessary and too long. I don’t know why you didn’t just have the UI appear like every other button.
For rebirthing, the button plays its click animation in full and then opens the UI, causing unresponsive UI.
The tutorial only explains the absolute basics and you’re left to figure everything else out yourself.
Not being able to read the tutorial text at your own pace isn’t good, it slows down the game for fast readers and can make the tutorial difficult to understand for slow readers.
The game is really bright and unpleasant on the eyes, although that may just be because its 12AM, my room is dark and I’m tired.
Gameplay just wasn’t that engaging. Again, its the same “steal a” format we’ve seen a million times.
The baseball bat just didn’t work on high ping, even with someone standing still right infront of me.
The lack of notifications or any visual element for when your base is protected / unprotected isn’t the best. The base looked identical and there wasn’t any notifier that you were no longer protected.
The only thing I can say that I liked about the game was the slimerancher inspiration, but when that’s all positive I can say, it doesn’t seem all that good.
