PowerTheGrid

Hello and welcome to the first Power The Grid development log. I am solo self-taught developer working on a game around an idea that I have for a tycoon/Sim game. Using my background in Energy and Environment I am attempting to create a strategy game around energy systems mechanics.

Your job in the game is to combine the different energy sources (coal, water, sun, wind, biomass, etc) to satisfy the electricity needs of a regular city. Each source has its own specifications and the eletricity consumption changes along the way.

After 1 year of learning/working on C# and Unity, I completed what I call the first alpha, a playable build with 4 levels and some bugs.

I tested with some friends and got other developers to test in on Feedback Friday on reedit and corrected the bigger problems. It was time to gather some data from the general gamers so I launched the game for free as early access on gamejolt.

A week has passed now and I want to recap the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good

I got 1654 views which I consider a very good exposure and they converted into 809 plays/downloads (there is both PC, MAC and Web builds available). From what I understood the downloads number in the image below refer to the total number of users that either clicked to play the web build or clicked to download the PC/MAC builds.

The package analytics on gamejolt tells me that the PC and MAC builds got 359 downloads in total, so I should have got around 500 plays on the web build.

PC/MAC: 359 Downloads

Web build: 450 Plays (809-359)

I enjoy this numbers because finally I have people interacting with my game and I can start to learn from it.

Addtionally I received some good comments and pointed bugs which is nice.

The Bad

With all these plays it was time to look into my unity analytics, in particular the funnel I had set up to see how far the players were progressing in the game.

Here I spotted a big issue, as you see in the Unity funnel only 179 plays were recorded and I already had around 30 before launching on Gamejolt. It means I only had around 150 plays, very far from the 809 that gamejolt analytics told me.

I found 2 explanations for this, the first I don’t actually understand why it happens, but as you can see in the image of the gamejolt analytics above, the PC/Mac bulds only got 53 installs. This means that from the 359 downloads only 53 people actually executed the file and played the game. Why would so many people download it and never try? Bots?

PC/Mac: 53 actual Plays

Web build: 97 actual Plays (150-53)

The second cause is more troubling, what happened to all my 450 web build plays? If I recorded only 150 plays this week and 53 belong to the standalone versions, I got 97 plays from the web builds.

Fortunately I think I know the problem here. For some reason google chrome does not support my web version, when a user clicks to play in the gamejolt page, gamejolt counts it as a play, but the game never starts because it does not run on chrome.

The google analytics page I created some days after tells me that 65% of visitors are using chrome. This supports my assumption.

Initially I thought that maybe unity analytics did not collect data from web builds but I think that the google chrome problem argument makes more sense. Regarding the 159 plays I got, the number are not very exciting since only 18% of players reached the level 4, I don't know how many actually completed it, but I will for sure track that next time.

The Ugly

Despite the fact that almost all comments I received were good and positive. The ratings tell a very different story, and after 22 ratings I have a score of 3.7, considering that around 4 five-star ratings came from friends, things don’t look very good. My hope is that most of the negative ratings came from people that could not play the game and got frustrated. Or worse, they got frustraded because they could not understand it. Anyway I am working to have those issues sorted out next release.

What is next?

From seeing people playing the game, I understand that playing it can be confusing and some players end up passing the first levels not knowing how, or not knowing why they fail. I am working on extra sound/visual clues to make things more straitghforward, better congratulations screens to make it more rewarding, and some animation effects to make it more engaging.

I will try to fix this google chrome problem too, a reedit user already pointed me in the right direction to fix the google chrome problem and I am eager to try it.

For the few ones that made it to the end, there is something coming too. I am working on level and it will be the first real mission with more options, more challenges and more gameplay.

See you soon! Any feed back is always appreciated.

Thanks for reading.