Slipstream Alpha Mini Post-Mortem

Note: This was originally written as an internal post-mortem for a very small team. I've decided to publish it to LinkedIn for anyone who might be interested ??

What is Slipstream?

Slipstream is a game that was designed from the ground up for Twitch streamers to play with their communities. In it, the streamer is the captain of a starship, and their viewers are the crew. As the captain, the streamer is responsible for directing and coordinating the crew. The crew work together in real-time to fulfill the captain's orders, defeat enemy aliens, and survive the perils of space. Today, it supports 100s of players concurrently per ship.

What was the scope?

Alpha test

Originally:

• 50 streamers
• 2 week playtest

Due to demand, we increased that to:

• 90 streamers
• 4 week playtest

Results:

• 700+ unique players across all timezones
• 500+ ships launched (multiplayer game sessions)
• $0 ad spend
• Streamer retention: 1-day: 55%, 7-day: 43%
• Largest ship: 54 concurrent players

What went right?

Community

When our player base was asked what their favorite thing about Slipstream was, the answer was almost unanimous: the community. In hindsight, this is no surprise. Twitch and other streaming services are built on player communities. We saw an active and engaged community grow in our Discord during the alpha. Players started recognizing each other in chat or in-game and began forming groups to play together. Some players who had never streamed before started their own channels to play Slipstream with their friends.

Feedback from players:

• 70% said they would specifically seek out streamers who play Slipstream

The feedback from players also told us that Slipstream was a great way to find new communities to play with. All told, it has somewhat reframed our vision of Slipstream to be not just a game, but also a community building tool.

Community management

Another common thread in our responses was that our players appreciated the availability and transparency of our dev team. Many said they enjoyed interacting with us in chat, and found it fun when devs would join a game to play along.

Most of our community management involved answering gameplay and technical questions, discussing features and the roadmap, and communicating downtime and deployments. We also had a lot of fun with our community, sharing memes and playing games together. Overall this created a very positive environment for our players.

Some anecdotes of successful interactions with our community:

• During one scheduled downtime, we delayed the downtime so that a streamer could finish a particularly difficult session with their audience. This was appreciated immensely by the streamer and their audience.
• One streamer was having a special event the day after the alpha was to end. We extended the alpha so that they could play during the special event.
• We focused on fixing bugs and features that the community helped identify. Players appreciated that there needs were given top priority.
• We noticed a surplus of a certain resource that players were accruing in-game, so Eric had the idea to allow players to trade them in for another resource. However, that feature did not exist in game. So he set up a Discord channel where players could trade with us directly, and we'd manually go into the database and update their accounts. This was an interesting way to extend the fiction of the game outside of the app itself, and players loved it.

Gameplay

We've been constantly re-evaluating Slipstream to make sure the core gameplay loop is fun. Post-alpha, we're quite confident that it's heading in the right direction. We saw very healthy 1-day through 7-day retention numbers, and our players were very vocal about how much they enjoyed the game.

Feedback from players:

• 87% said they had a positive experience playing the game.
• 94% said they would play Slipstream when it returned.

The feedback is promising, and although the game will change a lot between now and launch, we believe it validates our process. We see no reason to change our process as we continue to iterate on the game.

Engagement sweetspot

The biggest unknown in this space is how much attention a community game could safely demand from both the streamer and viewer. If a game is too interactive, it would distract from the stream. Or the streamer would be too focused on the game to engage with the audience. We are pleased to report that Slipstream's gameplay was not too exhausting or burdensome. Players had no problem playing the game for hours and hours, participating the whole time.

Another unknown was if players would download a game and run it on their desktop. Again, we were pleased to see that this was not a barrier to entry for our players. We saw players of all ages and technical abilities download and play the game. There were only occasional minor technical hiccups that we will address in the future (see below).

What went wrong?

No mobile support

Slipstream is a downloadable desktop game, like many others. But community games are often browser games. We weren't sure if we should take on the challenge of supporting desktop (Windows and Mac), browser, and mobile, so we decided to focus on desktop for the alpha, then poll the players to see what mattered to them most. In retrospect we feel that our player count and retention numbers would have been even higher for the alpha if mobile support was available.

Feedback from players:

• 72% said that mobile device support was important to them.

Based on our own intuition, and user feedback, we will be prioritizing mobile support for the next phase.

No moderation tools

We didn't build any tools for streamers to manage their games. For example, simple moderation features to kick idle players.

Feedback from streamers:

• 80% said that moderation tools were of moderate to extreme importance to them.

We responded quickly by deploying an idle timeout into the game, which solved some friction in the alpha. But we'll need to build out a full suite of tools for the beta and beyond.

Deploy downtime and app delivery friction

We were working around the clock to ensure the alpha ran smoothly, from a technical and a community management aspect. As such, we would have preferred to deploy new builds of the game nightly. But our server deployment process was manual and time-consuming. And the game was delivered as a downloadable app, which meant that players had to download a new version of the game every time it was updated. In the future, we will need to optimize and automate our server deploy process, as well as move to a digital distribution platform like Steam to deliver client updates.

Final thoughts

We're incredibly happy with how smooth the alpha went. From game design, to quality of service, to community management, we feel confident in our team's ability to deliver a great final product. There were a few minor hiccups along the way, but we consistently received feedback that Slipstream offered one of the smoothest alphas that players had ever seen.

Regarding market fit for this game: Our original hypothesis was that there was a gap in the market for a large-scale, cooperative, asymmetrical, streamer-led community game. There are some similar games that exist today, but they are all passive, non-interactive experiences. Slipstream is a very active experience that connects streamers with their audience unlike anything else. It's been very rewarding to see our hypothesis validated by the alpha test. It seems that when a game like this comes to market, players will be eager to play it, find their communities, and bring others into it. With these unknowns now behind us, we're even more excited to finish Slipstream and bring it to market.