Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Game development.

When I design levels for my games, I try to make them funny and challenging.

I always think how much will players enjoy my levels. I guess you do the same.

But I have a question… Do players play all levels? Is it worth the pain of testing and finetuning the n-th level when the average player will never see it?

How many players will see all levels?

I collected some data with the amazing SWFStats API about LineBall‘s first 10 days in the wild.

More than 250,000 players tried to solve the game, so here it is a table with the collected data:

LEVEL COMPLETED	PLAYERS
No levels completed	251748
Level 1	233012
Level 2	211254
Level 3	191477
Level 4	156316
Level 5	136954
Level 6	120399
Level 7	106503
Level 8	99437
Level 9	95265
Level 10	85490
Level 11	76568
Level 12	57789
Level 13	53030
Level 14	52739
Level 15	49088
Level 16	47611
Level 17	41279
Level 18	38658
Level 19	36501
Level 20	33091
Level 21	32658
Level 22	29162
Level 23	28571
Level 24	27815
Level 25	27578
Level 26	27017
Level 27	26722
Level 28	26344
Level 29	25436
Level 30	25318
Level 31	24986
Level 32	24688
Level 32	24093
Level 34	22756
Level 35	21219
Level 36	19796
Level 37	19551
Level 38	18071
Level 39	17785
Level 40	16105
Level 41	16077
Level 42	15804
Level 43	15538
Level 44	15534
Level 45	14943
Level 46	14481
Level 47	14365
Level 48	13636

As you can see, only 5,4% of them made it until the last level, look at this picture to see the playing curve:

Now it’s time to understand why and when players leave the game.

Every level is started by a certain amount of players. The problem is some of them don’t complete it. This may happen for several reasons… the level could be too hard for some of them (noobs!!), or the game starts to get boring after some levels.

If it’s normal some players quit the game without beating the n-th level, you should worry if a lot of players do it. Probably levels are unbalanced or the game gets boring after a while.

I would set the “give up ratio” to 15%

This means if 100 players start a level and less than 85 complete it, there is something wrong in it.

This is the graph of LineBall give up ratio

As you can see, levels 4 and 12 made me lose a lot of players. Since I am using inter-level ads, made me lose a lot of money too.

Time to think about what went wrong with these two levels and do a better level design next time.

Do you agree?