You’re looking well fed, Pilot! Those pants are looking a little tight after eating all that tuna. Looks like somebody needs some extra PT this week!
Last update we saw the introduction of a new mission type, the tuna raid. This included a whole new mission type, with new objectives and challenges.
What changed
- A new “factory” mission environment with a Tuna Raid mission
- Removal of the mission timer, replacing it with mission objectives
- A new procedural generation system for creating random missions with different objectives and stages.
The Short Version
The new mission system has kept players engaged from mission start to mission completion, even with when they take longer to finish and have more complex objectives. We haven’t found the new missions give players enough of a reason to keep coming back, but it has made a better play experience.
The Long Version
General Performance (and boring numbers)
New Users: 25 (+0%)
Daily Active Users (DAU): 3 (-25%)
Weekly Active Users (WAU): 17.33 (+20%)
Weekly Stickiness (DAU/WAU): 0.16 (-40%)
D1 Retention: 4% (-54%)
Average Session Length: 195s (+100%)
Average Overall Feedback: 3.8/5 (+3%)
The two stand out statistics here are the increase in session time, and decrease in retention. We saw a huge increase in our session time, doubling to 3.25 minutes. This is most likely because there is no mission time limit, and are taking longer to complete.
Session Length Distribution
When looking at the distribution of session lengths we can start to see a bump around the 10-11 minute mark, meaning we’re starting to see players who engage with the game for a respectable amount of time in a single sitting. This is reassuring to see because it means we’re finding some players who engage with the game even in its early stage.
The fall in retention is significant, but we haven’t been adding retention mechanics. We’ll hopefully see an improvement in those when we start testing the item progression systems.
Take Away:
- We saw a drop in retention, but we haven’t been focusing on that. We haven’t been giving a good reason for people to keep coming back.
- Our session length is up, which means people are playing through the new longer content. It’s possible that there is a correlation between longer session and drops in retention, but that’s something we can watch as we get larger sample sizes.
- Our rating it holding solid and players are reporting a positive experience.
- We’re starting to see growth in session length outliers. This is a positive sign we’re starting to find our audience.
Tuna Raid Mission
A primary objective of the Tuna Raid update was to test the performance of the new mission generation system, the tuna factory environment and the new mission type. We expected to see an improvement in session length, retention and number of missions played. After analysing player behaviour we found we came up short on a couple of our success criteria.
We did not see an increase in retention and mission plays, but saw a huge improvement in session length. We also found that we had a very high rate of mission completion, be it success or failure. Basically, if someone starts a mission there is a good chance they will finish it.
Mission Completion Breakdown
The blue and red sections of the graph are people who completed a mission, successfully or otherwise. It shows that ~75% of people who start a mission will complete it. Of the remainder we can see that ~7% of people would quit a mission, and ~17% would close the game. Having such a high completion rate at this point is very promising. It means we are seeing the majority of players completing a mission loop, from selecting the mission to ending the mission.
Mission Type Breakdown
Having a deeper look at which missions players were engaging with, we can see that the majority of mission plays are the tuna raid (red). We can see there is still a demand for side missions, which provide a shorter play experience.
Take Away:
- We had a much greater increase in session time than we expected, but fewer repeat missions. We are getting an average of 2 missions per session, but that number needs to get higher.
- We saw a larger drop in retention suggesting that more work needs to be done to give players a reason to keep playing content.
- We had the majority of players complete the mission, be it success or failure. Given we removed the time limit end, this means players were engaging the mission all the way to the end.
- We have about a quarter of people who either quit the mission (which means they found the button, so that’s good), or background the game (that’s not as good). Given how early the level is in development, this is still fairly promising.
- Having a high failure rate isn’t a bad thing, given we want to have difficulty as a way to promote player progression.
Other Feedback
We also received some general feedback about the state of the game from our feedback form. Players are still pleased with the core shooting mechanics, which is reaching a state we’re happy with. While this is something we will continue to iterate and improve on over time, we’re confident we are on the right path.
We’ve also had feedback on general polish issues (like sound and level section transitions), and they can rest assure that we will be working on those as we get further into the project.
Summary
The Tuna Raid mission has shown us that people will play longer form missions, with respond favourably with feedback. The retention rates and session times have a long way to go, but that’s something we will be focusing on more in future updates.
Interested in joining our squadron of Test Pilots? Sign up here: http://bit.ly/skysquadronsignup