Recently I noticed that, while I’m in the game just testing, about 70% of players join, hover around spawn for 3 minutes then leave. I don’t understand why this happens, and it’s seriously harming our engagement, where we now average at just 3 minutes session time.
This hurts our discoverability severely, and I’m worried there might be some issue I can’t find out about or a bug that prevents players from playing.
What we’ve tried:
Forcing the initial loading screen to cut after 6 seconds if it isn’t ready yet
Adding a tutorial so players aren’t confused
Reducing the tutorial to just 5 steps, with a skip button at each step
I have tested several times by clearing my own data to see what a new player experiences, and it takes me about 25 seconds to wait for the loading screen and finish the tutorial. I have not experienced any bugs while joining.
Here is our game:
Does anybody have any insights as to why players lose interest so fast? If anybody could just spend a minute to join the game and let me know what their initial thoughts are would be worlds of help too. Thank you in advance.
are the people bacons or noobs? cuz if they are, they are probably just pooping and farting and joining any game that seems interesting enough before getting bored, if they arent bacons, ur game is just probably boring
A cutscene sounds like a good idea, I might experiment with that and see how players react to it.
Could this run the risk of losing players attention since they can’t get into gameplay immediately? I was seriously shocked by how easily some players lose interest this fast, and all of a sudden I understand all the click-and-win games on the front page.
One of the reasons I think players might not be so interested is probably because this game seems like it’s built towards an older audience? I’ve played and tested the game out just now and the general vibe of the game does feel more suited to the older generation rather than the younger one imo! Not sure if that was the intention when it comes to the player base but I think it’s maybe a problem of younger players coming on and not having any interest since the game is revolved around working a job for several hours which obviously if you’re young you probs wouldn’t wanna do that and would rather play something that involves a lot more running around and interacting with actual players.
I see what you mean, and yeah we did design the game for more 9+ ages. We were thinking that games like Work at a Pizza Place and Bloxburg have a similar premise, and we were hoping to extend what both of those games might be missing that players enjoy.
Just wondering, do you have any suggestions for features we could add that give players options other than just doing their jobs? Any suggestion isn’t too big and small for us!
I think one of the reasons is the excessive text at the start of the game. I know in reality there isn’t much text, but the player wants to get immediately into the game without having to read.
For example, instead of the ‘lengthy’ process to pick between receptionist / housekeeper, just instantly ask players which role they want similar to how Adopt Me implements their role selection on join. They know what these jobs generally involve, you don’t have to explain it, and they probably won’t read your explanation anyway.
Basically, I don’t think you need to explicitly state as much as you do at the moment. Players hate to read (myself included, I just skipped most of the text) and I was still able to get through the tutorial.
Suggestion 1.5:
To expand on the overall idea, I think you should ‘force’ players to take on some of the core tasks at the beginning so they understand what they should actually be doing in the game intuitively. For example, use arrow beams to guide players to locations such as their house or locations to complete tasks. I know you think you explain everything in text so players should know what to do, but unless you may it glaringly obvious, the majority will still be confused.
Suggestion 2:
Your UI buttons all seem to use offset and not scaling. Please have some sort of scaling, and you can use size constraints to cap out the limits if you want. But your buttons (particularly the map button) are too small on a larger PC screen.
Also, I would say to avoid overlapping the inventory UI circles at the bottom. I don’t think this is significant but I do think it’s clearer to differentiate between each tool if there is a space in between.
Thank you for the feedback! I strongly agree with the text, I truly never realized how cluttered the job selection was until now. I removed job descriptions, and I’ll make it open on the “resort” category automatically so players can immediately pick between the basic jobs.
I also heavily cut down on the text in the tutorial, but we’d like to keep the title/subtitle format so players hopefully understand to spend more time in the tutorial. We will keep the skip buttons in the tutorial at all times though!
As for UI scaling, we avoided using scaling because TextScaled is difficult to work with and we use a lot of 9-slice images for frames, buttons etc. so strokes would be inconsistent too. We do automatically scale down UI for smaller screens, but we can scale up for larger screens too.
Edit: Also yes I’ll add the arrow pointers, you make a good point and players probably have a hard time knowing where to go when first joining
