NIGHTSTREAM Softlaunch Stage 1: Lessons And Changes

As part of our goal to release a game every year to take our player engagement to the next level, we wanted to jump back into the mobile fray. Our front-line mobile product for this year is NIGHTSTREAM. It's now available in select countries in South-east Asia as we prepare for global launch in Spring. Here are some of the lessons in design and implementation we learned:

Lesson #1: Difficult Casual Game

Nighstream was once described as the "DarkSouls of Runner Games" which is both hopeful and scary. It's true Nightstream is difficult, intentionally so. The challenge is to ensure gameplay and interface permit a fair and balanced assault onto players that puts the onus on them to improve without flaky bugs getting in the way. This has been challenging especially due to the way the levels were built early on, which makes them difficult to edit.

Level polish and iterating has been one of the most challenging parts of development. Where to place additional barriers, save points and power-ups. One cheat that has been very useful is the adding of ramps onto difficult corners. Instead of having to re-import the entire track and change the collision geometry, we cover it with a jump pad to boost you around the corner. Game Development is full of duct-tape.

Further, to help readability, we added the tried-and trusted yellow-black borders on important collision edges, ensuring silhuettes are more readable.

Improved edge work and highlights to clarify the simple shapes - even at high speeds.

Lesson #2: Unusual format

Unlike other runner games, the designers wanted to give more range for horizontal motion and opted for a sideways profile of the screen. This gave more focus on playing with two hands, and the interface was adjusted to cope with two overlapping inputs competing for the jump instructions by players. A common play style is with two thumbs. The benefit is faster response, the trade-off is that it's harder to be walking around while playing.

One change we are making is that later levels are tending to be a bit more vertical in their layout, as it's still more intuitive for people to focus on the middle of the screen. Overlay flat levels do not play as fast-paced and dense in comparison.

Denser, more focused game play spaces of upcoming levels.

Lesson #3: Evolving Monetization Strategies

The benefit of the SEA softlaunch was we could test our our seasonal content. We've been looking at engagement with interstitial ads as well as pure in-app purchase models. What we're seeing is what we expected from our co-dev experience with IAP -- some content monetizes much better than others. Hoverboards work best, so do some funky costumes. That being said, given this is a single-player game right now, the player drive to customize will be much lower than in Fortnite or Rainbow Six: Siege as there's not yet any costume to show off to peers in an online arena. We'll scale our content goals for 2019 accordingly.

Sometimes less is more. While characters were overall more challenge to build and animate, the easier-to-produce boards monetized on average higher than characters. This is likey due to the striking visuals we could experiment with in terms of their design.

Constant testing of the toolchain is also crucial. After simply moving from IronSource to Unity Ads, ARPDAU increased by 25%.

Lesson #4: Understanding Demographics

Our player base has recently grown up older as well as more gender diverse. We do not tend to attract overly young or overly casual players. We are however attracting more female players than expected for a game we expected to play particularly well with competitive casual players. This could be due to enhancements in the story levels and the attached graphic novel, or just simply better gameplay balancing .We need to further research this.

Lesson #5: Different Gamers, Different Trainers

Building tutorials is notoriously difficult. Some click it away immediately, some innately require it. Some want to read up online first or faster, some want to begin to compete immediately. After initial feedback, we started focusing more on videos and tutorials online such as on Youtube instead of packing them directly into the app as interactive tutorials. This allows users easy access and better interfacing.

Our Journey through softlaunch continues and we'll have more updates soon!