The big picture metric for mobile is the 7 day retention. A game isn’t very marketable If you don’t have enough in the game for players to open the game and play for 7 days. I was originally going to release a much simpler version but quickly realized there wasn’t enough there for a complete product. There were additional elements required to get players to stay engaged for 7 days.
So I’ve been heads down pretty hard getting this MVP (minimal viable product) for the last 3 months since the last blog entry. I got the final artwork in and refined every system. I also added the 2nd stage which was the biggest challenge.
Stage 1 (Home Backyard) and Stage 2 (Big Junkyard) are actually 2 independent games in one. Each stage owns its data. They use the same code base but Stage 2 uses some features that don’t exist in Stage 1. Some data does overlap across the entire game. The Cards and Gems persist across the game. The Save file was broken up into global and stage sections.
Trello board leading up tp open beta release
Next step
Over the next week or so i’ll be making a few fixes based on feedback I received. I’d like to do a full release in the next week.
I already fixed most of the issues. The main issue being performance on lower end devices. I got about 10x performance gain already by just cleaning up some materials and optimizing models to reduce shader counts, draw calls & batches. Besides that there’s some minor balancing.
This fix was done before open beta. Optimized the customer mesh from 25+ shaders running per customer down to 1. The advanced people 2.0 asset I am using to generate random characters has horrible mobile performance. Exporting the random character and doing some hand edits let me optimize for mobile.
Optimized all cars for mobile.
Reduced batches from 100+ down to 18