We launched many versions of Beekyr for Android and OUYA since October 2014.... We saw the stats and we tweaked the difficulty from something very hard to something playable and then to something really boring, just to avoid the players getting stuck in some levels of the game. Just to let you know, we added difficulty levels keeping the hard gameplay for those who are good at shmup or similar videogames.
This is what we did:
1- We had a Normal and Hard mode.
2- Then we created an Easy mode, a new Normal , and the old Normal was moved into the Hard mode.
3- We created the tutorial levels. And they became level 1 and 2.
4- Finally Normal became siers and the easy mode was even easier...
All steps to reduce mortality in our game.
Since the latest version of Beekyr that was released on the 10th July (for PC and iOS) we have learned that PC gamers play far better than smartphone casual gamers. Not only that, casual gamers are terrible terrible players!
How do we know this?
We have some crazy unexpected stats that reveal that Beekyr played in the easiest level (novice) seems to be terribly boring to any gamer that has some experience playing games. But seems to be really hard for those who are casual gamers.
Here are the stats just for July 2014:
8050 times the game was opened.
There was 15.037 Game Over events.
From which, 6500 people died in Stage 3. (the old stage 1)
But what about the tutorial levels?
Tutorial levels have hardly any enemies and they hardly shoot. In this tutorial people can get killed that's something they need to learn about to. We really though nobody would be killed in those levels but stats say otherwise...
The Pretty sad stats, the GAME OVER tutorial stats:
733 games ended in stage 1, NOVICE
476 games ended in stage 2, NOVICE
466 games ended stage 1, NORMAL
1434 games ended stage 2, NORMAL
That makes a total of 3109 players died in the TUTORIAL levels in, what we think, easy modes.
That is the 38% of the games played are finished in the tutorial levels because the players loses all 4 lives.
At least we halved the game overs in Stage1, we went down from 6500 to 3100... Still pretty sad for tutorial levels.
But is this the end of real gaming? Shall we just make silly games for mobilephones and stick with the real games into PC and consoles? Or shall me make the player invincible all the time?
Is people really used to really commercial games where they want you to keep you playing to sell you later other stuff or sequels or the games. Do they want to make the gamers feel powerful when in reality they are lowering the difficulty to unreasonable levels just so sell more?
Come on, in this kind of games kids of 3 years old in the 80 & 90s could play better!
We, the indie devs, come to save the world from boring games!
Play more hard indie games and quite silly super easy commercial games! They are no good for you and your brain.
Play and challenge a game like Beekyr!
Remember KaleidoGames, you will never see an super easy game from us!
We believe that before the money comes the fun and the challenge.
Vortex Attack will be awesome!
