Easy Week

Hi everyone!

We’re taking it easy this week, as I wanted to try something new after that marathon of Pokémon Go posts. As a result, I’m taking the week off to learn a little bit about video editing to see what I can pull together in place of a blog post. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll have a new post up next week anyways. I’ll just break down it into my usual analysis style post instead.

To prepare for next week, I’d love to hear your thoughts on excellent and memorable boss designs. I’ll be looking into Destiny’s Darkblade boss fight, and I want to compare it to other strike bosses within Destiny.

I’ll see you next week,

Scott

Time for Mobile Apps

How much does time matter in mobile aps? More of, how many users will you lose if you have an additional 5 seconds between the end of the game and when the player gets back into the action? 5 seconds between the end of a game and the start of the next game adds up. 10 games later the player has spent an additional 50 seconds waiting.

This question was actually asked about the loading screens, which taught the players to play the games in GameDay Heroes. You could see how this was a tricky question because this is how players were taught to play the game

At my previous place of employment the question was brought up to the design team and it’s difficult to measure. Users don’t simply tell you why they quit. But it seems like the consensus is that less time between the end of a round and the next moment where your players are engaged is a good thing. Because every second your player isn’t engaged they are running the risk of getting distracted by something else or getting bored.

Another similar issue we ran into was losing players from the moment they booted up the app to the moment they finished tutorials. This resulted in us redoing our tutorials in Heroes and Rivals to make them dramatically shorter. Thus reinforcing the thought: get the players playing as fast as possible. (While our tutorials were interactive they still restricted play to individual tasks, which may bore some players.)

Jump and Juke we knocked down from 7 steps to 4 because of this

This school of thought has influenced me and my team in our next app to create an experience which keeps the player playing for longer sessions and eliminates as much “Waiting time” as possible.

Stay tuned for more info.

-Scott