Javascript/Mobile (play on Android, trailer, website, reddit, discord)
Brief recap: Overworld is a fantasy roguelike designed for mobile from the ground up. One run lasts about 10 minutes in which you’ll slay beasts, cast spells, and finish quests. Choose from 35 distinct heroes like the giant, mermaid, and wizard. This game has been in development for 6 years by my company, Red Asteroid Games.
I’ve spent the past 9 months getting Overworld onto Android, now I’m doing a variety of integrations and optimizations in preparation to throw traffic at it.
This week I released v0.4.6 with 3 main additions:
- User-facing records
- Gender selection
- Colour scheme selection
The user facing records were low hanging fruit, there are tons of numbers flying around every game I just picked the most interesting ones to track. Best times, least moves, high score, were obviously. Then there are single-match counts of tiles explored, food eaten spells cast, and so on. I track these for the user overall and for each hero. The records played into next week’s work.
Gender selection applies to humans, the only heroes with male and female sprites so far. Since your first tutorial is with a human though, I threw up a big “CHOOSE!” screen before the game begins.
Colour scheme was slightly trickier as I had to formalize all my colour consumption in the codebase. I’m Canadian so statistically you think I’m spelling “colour” wrong, though I normally try to use color in player-facing contexts. I did a video of the picker:
I also posted a couple of simple strategy guides. They don’t seem to be generating a lot of interest so I’m going to switch gears to a lengthier, more difficult playthrough. “The Orc” is still awaiting release.
This week I also integrated with Google Play Services, achievements and leaderboards. Good stickiness for old and new players, the achievements are good positive feedback in early games and I’m pretty interested to see what people are getting for high scores. I had to make some tough decisions on how to set leaderboards up, since there’s so much to measure:
- Metrics: Time, moves, score
- Difficulty: Easy, normal, hard, expert, impossible
- Hero: x 35
You can check the discord for the conclusions I made there. This material should be out early next week.
With that in place I want to see if retention has improved so I might try doing a few things to encourage beta testers to join. Hope you, the reader, will consider doing so! Here’s the link!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.overworld.app