Stickman Arena 4

Passed a while since the last devlog. Almost 2 months. Big vacation. Let's go over the progress made.

Second Half of July

First, from mid to the end of July I mostly took time off. Was on vacation with my family, and watched TV show Breaking Bad & played video games. Took some time off the full time work on FTB.

Before the time off I analyzed the data from the Google Ads campaign I run, and I'm satisfied with many aspects, from engagement and to conversion rates. Problem is the percent of people who finish the tutorial - just around 10%.

I have some low effort manual in the game, but known fact reading is the worst method of teaching. And how people understand they can use abilities to go over walls? how they understand the goal? and I'm sure most skip the manual entirely. So I added in game tutorial - during the 8 seconds of death screen(and more if you wish) you can see a panel with 6-7(lol) tutorials I consider crucial for the game. Get xp, choose upgrades, how to teleport between walls, the goal of the game, what's the hp bar and xp bar and so on. Added images, relatively short text and option to always view this panel during gameplay.

I define tutorial completion as reaching account level 1. Previously you could accidentally do quests or watch long ad to get more xp and complete the tutorial. I removed it before you reach account level 1 - so I can easier see if you really understand the basics or not. And guess what despite making it harder to complete this way, the percent of people who do complete it jumped from 10% to around 20%, which is great.

Removed in game chat as realized I received reports about toxic messages and as solo dev, don't have the time to deal with it. Also the text chat causes 50% of the crashes. Also previously FTB targeted ages below 13, and in this world there are very strict rules - I cannot sign in to google play games by default, need to show age panel etc and it adds significant overhead, complexity, and much longer review times on both Play and App stores. Decided to opt out so game now for ages 13+ only, which simplifies experience(no age panel) and development process significantly. I published this update. It was end of July. Oh and I added some interstitial ads, when you exit from the game and between rounds every 4 minutes for non Premium members. You know I spend 3 USD per day on ads and get nothing back(I have IAP no one buys and rewarded ads no one watches). Gave this monetization type a try.

Demonworld & Fingerball

I have a history of making games. I was doing my bachelors in computer science during school, and of course as someone who learned programming and enoyed it I made games. In java, cpp, OpenGL etc. Many interesting projects came to life. I published them on itch.io. Here is a video of my pre Unity projects.

The game Bad Balls (Fingerball) was one of the projects you can see in this video. Immediately after publishing this video I moved to Unity, and my very first game was Challenge Me (aka Demonworld). There were many boring projects I made, asset flipts or a trash BTD Battles clone. But hey all were made from scratch so took some effort. I had 3-4 projects that were really fun imo, or original. As they are fun to play, and non match 3 but something actually unique, decided to revive them and publish on mobile. Spent on this the first half of August.

So Challenge Me renamed into Demon Trials renamed into Demonworld. Actually it was published on the Play Store from 2022. But the issue is as I'm a darksouls enjoyer I made the game hard. Like really hard. Hard on the level people gave it 1 star rating over the last 5 years. I hid it from the play store while was working on FTB as deemed it not a quality enough game to be visible. But now I added difficulties making it playable both for easy enjoyers and hard as higher difficulties unlock as you complete easier one's. Fixed many bugs, tested stuff and made the game production ready.

The original Fingerball is I think the second game I ever made? Bad Balls then. Simply small window on the PC and I dodge balls with the mouse. Pure java code without engine. There is of course classic mode where the balls just jump between walls, and then added interesting levels. First one was rain where balls come from above. Second prison and balls chasing you. Third is boss fight with the Sun. In the mobile version released of course made changes - made Classic balls jump between one another, prison balls split instead of send smaller soldier balls at you, and Sun made ever increasing difficulty. Made mobile friendly, smart increasing difficulty over time instead of hard coded easy, medium and hard, and made it support all orientations and ways to play.

I gotta admit - I decided to give Unitys AI a try with the Fingerball remake. The assets of course not AI generated as, you know, these are balls, what assets are we talking about? But everyone talks about claude code, and the fact that no need to develop stuff by yourself so I gave it a try. My experience? AI good for quick boilerplate start, but then harder to maintain code as you did not make it, many issues with it and burning tokens and money very quickly. Don't think will give AI to develop entire code base anymore but only use it for smaller tasks. Anyway was an interesting experience.

To both Demonworld and Fingerball added of course interestitial ads, and the option to remove them for 1$. I made simple google ads campaign for installs and got 500 installs for each game to see the 500+ installs mark on the store, and to analyze if there are bugs or issues and stabilize the game. I finished with the projects now - there is not enough content for them to be very successfull, but they add to the Vippy Games portfolio, may offer unique experience to people, so it was worth reviving them. Took 1 week to revive each game(Demonworld was already in Play Store so just added difficulties, Fingerball there are balls so pretty simple). Added ads, IAP, analytics and IAP reviews of course, all according to the best practices learned from FTB. Develop, monetize, move on.

Back to FTB

There is another game I made once, that in my opinion there isn't something like this in the market, and I want to remake it for mobile, so will keep it a secret for now. But want to take a break from making new games as if will start working on it want to do it not in a week to revive but as a high quality, standalone game and not a side project. So back to FTB, I checked the stats from the pre-remakes update.

Saw that the tutorial completion jumped from 10% to 20%, that I got a lot of 5 star reviews and FTB rating increased to 4.5 stars! my crashes reduced signifiantly and the game started to show on popular keywords like 'stickman', 'battle arena' and others. 7k people see my game icon organically every day. It's huge. Also, the ads yield 10% return. I spend 3 USD on google ads, and get back 0.3 USD via interstitial ads back. As previouly I had only rewarded ads and IAP I literally got nothing back and now 10% of ad spend received (and they are not that interrupting in my opinion, on average every 4 minutes).

I was excited as maybe it means something can still occur with the game? I tried to run not campaign to get max tutorial completionists but a one where I get maximum value but it failed. Apparently if I have 3 USD on campaign per day it will just get 2-3 rich people from United States and the budget is wasted, so TROAS campaign it's not the time for it yet. After trying optimizing for monetary value got back to optimizing ads for tutorial completion events. I prefer 20 players from anywhere in the world than 1 rich guy who might or might not spend money, at least at the current stage.

Also 1-2 more people bought premium, and the first coins purchase ever occurred (barrel of coins, yes the game is available from 2020 and the first coins purchase ever made now you may laugh 40k downloads btw). You know from this point I can apply the rule of multiplication. Make the game two times better and it's 20% return on ads, make ads campaign two times better and I get 40% back, maybe irritate players more with interstitials etc. I got a sense that there are areas I can optimize and can yield significant returns. Anyway so I began working on a huge update for the game, that launched to the stores yesterday, FTB 4.0.0.

FTB 4

Relatively Small Changes

Previously added the tutorial, removed chat etc. What can I do now to improve the how many percent of spend I get back? Of course improve the game. I added custom nicknames, which is crucial for customization and increases fun from game. Though the custom nickname only you see it, others will see your public display name, for the same reason removed chat - as cannot afford as single person to handle reports and non family friendly names.

I removed confusing menus and simplified stuff. I removed friends as no one used it anyway. Removed the dumb question on start whether you want to enter offline or online mode - will choose based on what game mode you play. Removed where could the disconnections on connection lose to improve experience. Reduced issues with conflict panel that caused bad experience. Also one guy in discord (many thanks!) drew 4 cool new skins! added them to the game and drew 6 new emotes in addition to that. Gigachad is here now. This was kind of my vision that players can work together on FTB and it happened! Added panel in skin selection menu to go to specific skin as now 25+ skins, and increased travel speed (we grew a bit).

The New Store

I updated the store. Previously it was complex and in many places - ugly coins generator, coin bundles menu, coins store and free rewards menu, FTB Premium menu... It was complex. Now the new store is a one, scrollable panel with all products you can buy. FTB Premium, coins, chest bundles, single chests. I made the free rewards at the bottom so you need to scroll past other stuff to get them. I made if you want to buy any product (skin, rune, chest) and do not have coins to be redirected to the buy coins section.

I made the chest opening experience better and fixed bugs related to it. The goal - add another revenue stream on top of the 10% back on ads. I truly believe that skins, abilities, runes and chest openings can be fun and previoulsy it was just confusing. I reduced rewards from the daily leaderboard as giving kings bounty chest is too good to be true and kind of breaks the economy. Added a very cheap chest bundle that anyone can buy at the cost of nerfing levelup chest rewards. Anyway changes in this area in an attempt to make it less confusing, more fun and beautiful, offer solution (buy coins) if you want something but no coins and to potentially unlock the revnue stream from IAP. Also previously premium menu was confusing and no one read it - now it's plain simple explaining all the benefits - daily chest, no ads, free skin and so on so you see that it's a 'damn good deal'.

Game Modes

No one plays online game modes but only with bots offline game. Why? because no one browsed rooms, everyone just clicked the first big play button. There are teams, battle royales, duels and no ones creates or even opens these menus. I realized that instead of offering tons of game modes(though was fun making them) better to create 1-2 high quality online one's that people will enjoy and play, and have big join buttons so people find players. Will be 1 game mode with AI and 2 online one's. It's fun fighting bots and previously they were also in online modes, but the main problem with online having bots is that one player controls the bots, and for other players the 30 bots are laggy. Another problem is that even if people join the room, the arena is so big they don't find one another leading to poor experience.

I experimented with stuff. In my opinion the most fun game mode of all is of course Titanic. Lives, battle royale, falling zones and full chaos. But the problem is that as it's battle royale once the game started other players cannot join so locking it in - and in small numbers of players battle royales are less fun, and add that to be fun need bots(will be laggy) and the arena too big so players won't find one another... bummer.

Decided to have 2 game modes - duels and improved brawl. Duels are unique mini arenas to fight sticks. It's a cool concept and different from the main arena one so added. Also no bots, small areas, and only 2 players are enough for fun game. I thought maybe to allow joining many players and not just 2 into duels so it will be a really stick gang fight but dropped the idea later (it's boring waiting for everyone to lose, and infinite respawns no point as finite game). Added custom logic of automatically being in waiting room, starting game once opponent joins, restarting game and going back to waiting room if opponent leaves. So welcome duel one of the 2 online high-quality game modes.

Now regarding brawl. It is unique in that there are teams and need to reach max score. It is different from the classic everyone by himself deathmatch in Arena AI. The issues are of course too large arena and bots lag. How to fix it? change it! In the old brawl 3 blue zones and 3 red zones were selected where the players will spawn with their teams accordingly, now made something different - in each game a random zone of the 9 available one's chosen, and there is a blue and red spawn points in that single zone. No bots, just teams fight to reach the score limit for a short time (2.5 minutes, classic game is 4 minutes). This way fun and unique each round, good feeling fighting in teams, and solves the no players online issue as only a small part of the arena is not covered in lava.

Brawl and duel game modes available after tutorial completion (stickman level 1), to avoid bots in online rooms and for players to understand the basics of gameplay first. Currently having only one server worldwide so people find one another so may be (very) laggy, and let's see maybe will increase server count later. For duel and brawl there are big join buttons now, and other game modes moved to a section called The Sandbox. These experimental game modes while fun, FTB is not popular enough yet for them to be meaningful as no players for them to be fun. Still, if someone wants to play it solo, with friends etc possible - but moved it under premium one time purchase to encourage players play online in public game modes therefore filling them, and ensuring verified fun experience. Currently keeping intesrtitial ads out of the online game modes and they will be only in the offline one, to avoid delays online and to encoruage play it. Also made that any stick kill - human, bot, online or local with AI will be counted towards the daily leaderboard scores and allowing to earn daily prizes! this way you don't have to play a certain way but the way you like and just claim your prizes!

Finale

So to conclude. Went on a side quest to work on other games and finished with them for now. FTB gave strong signs with positive reviews, stores keyword indexing, getting back revenue on ads. This huge update further simplifies it, improves the fun, adds customization, nicknames and many cool features. There is more content (brawl, duels) and therefore more fun - and higher chance people will enjoy getting specific item or chest in the new, great looking non confusing single store!

Will see how the game performs. Likely the next step from my side will be to improve the ads for FTB - as the main video is a single trailer made 8 months ago with older visuals. If I find a way to make better creatives, I will get more people, will earn more for the same cost, and more players to enjoy the fun of the game. Now in the game of optimizing return of investment bit by bit, and hopefully have some potential, yet to be sure need to give this update some time and infer conclusions based on metrics later.