by sofar » Thu Sep 14, 2017 18:54
Updates! More of a "how is it going" post:
It's been barely 2 weeks that the server is live, and we've had a blast. We've seen up to 14 concurrent players in the starting weekend, at many times there are 6 or more players online. We're continuing to monitor the difficulty and progress of players through the tutorial and other series, and we might make adjustments here and there.
So, a good time to take a look at some numbers!
- 673 unique clients connected to the media server (mtmediasrv).
- 681 clients retrieved the game music over HTTP
This is important data, it means that connection issues aren't caused by our server, and also it shows that most clients have curl/media server support enabled, which helps our server perform better. It also means we are doing a good job of serving clients the data they need, since the server media is roughly 30-35 megabytes of assets at the moment.
The reason it's that large is 3-fold. The music tracks are the largest factor. We want you to enjoy the game, and not feel like we've compromised on the experience, so we have 8 full stereo 44KHz tracks, and 17 megabytes of data for 8 tracks is really reasonable - less than 2mb per track average.
The Skybox textures are large, since we offer 6 sets so that boxes can have different atmospheres. Each set is 6 pictures again, and each photo averages 300kb. Again we're not willing to compromise on quality too much, so we've reduced them to a point where we feel that quality is maintained at a high level. The game uses very little 3D models. It's only about 200k total, including the player model. Game sound effects can be large, but we've attempted to conserve here. This means that we're still short quite a few sound effects that we need to add to the game. Only 2mb of sound effects are used, for a total of 120 sound effects, so they're really not that large. Textures are only (!) 2.1mb total. This is fantastic given that we're using all original textures that create a unique look and feel to the game.
As you can see, it's not small, but we have the infrastructure in place to make the download as smooth and fast as we can, and the data from log files shows that it's performing well.
So, let's look at player counts a bit.
We already noticed the geographic distribution of players earlier and that it's all around earth where people have come from, which is fantastic. There are some periods in time when the server is usually quiet, but I'm surprised often by players being online and building or playing at odd hours. I think the music really helps to make the server feel pleasant even if there are no other players around nearby.
- total players: 361
- total players who have completed the tutorial: 57
It's very obvious we lose a lot of players quickly, which isn't unsurprising - we have a lot of logins from android clients and most likely they just randomly logged in on the server without knowing anything about it. Since parkours is virtually impossible on tablets and phones, we won't likely ever retain any android or tablet player, and so we don't try either, it would make the game too easy and then we'd also lose PC players, which we don't want to do. Still, 5 new players per day average is a really good number.
Let's take a look at how far people get in the tutorial:
Completed:
- 1: 256
- 2: 193
- 3: 180
- 4: 134
- 5: 87
- 6: 59(*)
- 7: 66
- 8: 57
(*) The numbers look weird because part 6 was mistakenly omitted for the first few days from the series.
My interpretation is that this doesn't look too bad - there isn't one box that is causing most of the problems. As a matter of fact, the curve is fairly smooth. Even in the ridiculously easy box 1 we have many people give up. Do we want to make box #1 easier? Maybe, but not by too much. We can't add text signs everywhere, since a lot of players are likely not even english speaking. Arrows? That's really changing the appearance of the game, and not necessarily for the better.
Tutorial part 4 seems to be the first box where we see some larger numbers of players drop. We have to know that it takes most players 10-15 minutes maybe to get here, and their time commitment may just not be that large, and we're also not a server that appeals to the masses, so is it so bad that when the puzzles get a bit more difficult, that we lose some less dedicated players? In my opinion, not so much just yet. Tutorial part 5 has a similar drop. We're probably losing a lot of players that are bored already.
After box 5, however, we're almost not losing any player at all. So these really difficult boxes that everyone complains about? Not so tough in the end. Of course, we have no standards for acceptable failure levels yet :)
If you look back through the entire thread here, you see that in the end about 10% of all players unlock *all* the content, which is really good (This includes players that don't even successfully connect, at all). It's understandable that the tutorial removes a lot of uninterested players, and we actually want this.
Back to fixing bugs and adding cool new features :)