Attention, Pilots!
We’ve collected your field reports and crunched the data, and our findings are ready to report. To recap the last test flight, here was what we were looking to learn.
- Will players change the colour of their plane?
- Will players change the look of their character?
- How much will players engage with customisation?
The short version:
New players were less likely to use the customisation systems initially, but existing players were more likely to give it a go. Once someone started customising their plane or character, they spent a good amount of time trying out different options.
Character customisation was more popular than plane customisation, but very few people changed their character’s name.
The long version:
Player Retention and Acquisition
The first set of data we looked at was how many new players we got on day of release compared to existing players.
Blue: Daily Active Users
Green: New Users
We can see that when we release an update we get a lot of new players coming in, then it shifts to being mainly existing players. This tells us that people are keen to download the update when it comes out. After the release day we’ve got more of our new players, and see a significant drop off in people that hang around. Given the limited amount of content in the game at the moment, that’s not surprising.
Player Engagement with Customisation
Here we can see how many players engaged with either plane customisation or character customisation.
Blue: Plane Customisation
Green: Character Customisation
Yellow: Daily Active Users
On the first day we can see a huge spike in daily active users, which make sense given that’s when we released the update. We can also see that those users didn’t heavily engage with any customisation. We saw about half engage with character customisation, and a quarter engage with plane customisation. It’s interesting to note that characters are a more appealing initial customisation than planes, maybe because it’s a little like making your new character in an RPG.
After the initial burst of new users, we can see we had a pretty one to one relationship with people using the game and also engaging with our customisation systems.
Engagement with Plane Customisation
Of the people accessing the plane customisation screen, we also wanted to see how many people actually use it. Here we looked at our daily active users compared to how many people actually changed the colour of their plane.
Blue: Players selecting a new plane colour
Green: Daily Active Users
This second graph show how many times people previewed a paint colour vs selecting a paint colour.
Blue: Selecting a new plane colour
Green: Previewing a new plane colour
We can see from the first graph that our new players aren’t engaging with customising the colour of their plane, but the users that hang around do. When we look at the level of engagement with the customisation system in the second graph, we can see that there is a huge difference between selecting a colour and previewing a colour, meaning that the people in the plane screen previewed a lot of different options before picking one.
Engagement with Character Customisation
Next we’ll have a look at the engagement with our character customisation
In this graph, we see the number of people who accessed the customisation screen vs the number of people that altered their character.
Blue: View character screen
Green: Change character
Even though the number of people fluctuates with there is close to a 1:1 relationship between number of people opening the screen and number of people using the screen, which is a good sign that people are using it.
Next we can see what elements people were changing on their character. We tracked the number of times people cycled through different elements of their character’s face.
It seems that customising the characters eyes is slightly more popular than other features, it’s pretty erratic exactly what people wanted to modify.
Having a quick dive in to seeing what eyes are the most popular with players we can see that Eyes 7 was the most popular, and Eyes 4 was the least popular.
Left to Right: Eye 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Left: Eye 7, Right: Eye 4
Finally we investigated how many people changed the name of their character, and saw that very few people engaged with it. We had a look at how many people changed their face vs how many people changed their name
Blue: Name changes
Green: Face changes
We’re unsure if this is because people were not aware of it being an option, or simple people aren’t that keen on changing their name, but something to investigate more as we flesh out our character customisation options.
Summary
The primary thing we were looking to learn was will people engage with character customisation, and we can see from the last update that the answer is yes. We’ve also managed to pull a few interesting insights into how people will engage with character customisation.
We can see that new users are less interested in customisation than they getting into the game, but those who are interested in customisation care more about characters than planes.
When players do engage with plane customisation, they will spend time looking at the options before picking one, so we can say that while not a high priority, there is still a desire to customise the look of their plane.
Character customisation is definitely more popular, with the exception of name changing, which we saw very little engagement with. People wanted to change most of the different features on their character, with eyes being slightly more popular than other features. Of those eyes, we can see a clear preference for a couple of the options, with the rest being about equal popularity.
Remember you can join us on our discord at https://discord.gg/EnsSjZR, and if you have any friends you think may like to join our rag-tag squadron of testers, tell them to sign up at https://goo.gl/forms/agYSH9dtmnLuI8aw2