How to build in retention and player engagement as part of your early concept

1. Overview

Bringing new players into your game is always difficult, so how do you make sure you're keeping them engaged and happy? Managing churn and player engagement is one of the biggest challenges for every mobile developer, and should be top of mind as you plan out your game. The best retention and engagement strategies are designed before development even starts, as part of your core game loop.

In this tutorial we cover three main areas:

• How to create an amazing first time user experience (FTUE)

• How to improve retention and decrease churn

• The best player engagement methods.

2. First time user experience

We’ve all been there, laying on the couch looking through the app store, finding a game that looks fun, hitting download and then…

Likely you’re sticking with the game, or leaving (churning) out immediately. So how do you make sure players are having a great experience right away in your game? This is where the idea of first time user experience (FTUE) comes into play. Bringing new players into your game is difficult and often expensive, so it’s essential to make sure your early retention is high.

In this section we’ll walk through the FTUE basics, and explore some easy ways to keep players interested in your game early on.

3. How to design for retention and engagement

Now that we’ve covered some good ways to onboard players to your game, how do you work to keep them? Retention is one of the most important factors for any mobile game and in many ways determines the overall health of the game. While many developers only start thinking about retention deep into development, there are huge advantages to designing your game for retention from the early concept phase.

Reward your players

Daily or weekly rewards are now standard in many mobile games, and for a good reason. Daily rewards give players a strong reason to come back and play your game - especially if they offer compelling in-game content or currency.

• Give players a daily reward right as part of their first time user experience. This will immediately get them thinking about consecutive play sessions.

• Show the rewards for the next week, or even month. This gives players a sense of what they can work towards and expect if they stick with your game.

Notify your players

Thinking about how you want to deliver messaging to users is always something you can do early on. Notifications are a great way to bring players back into your game, although you need to be careful not to come across as too pushy.

• Keep it short. The best messages are usually less than 128 characters long, and you need to think about how it will display on multiple devices and screen sizes.

• Use emojis (seriously). These can be a great way to add visual flair and improve open rates.

• Personalize your messages. This requires some good player segmentation, but making the messages more relevant to who gets them is a great way to improve performance.

• A/B test. It’s always important to test multiple push notifications at the same time, often with a smaller subset of players initially. This lets you find out what messages are performing the best, and you can weed out underperformers.

• Reengagement. Even if a player has churned out of your game, if it’s still installed there is an opportunity to send them a reminder notification prompting them to give it another try.

Let’s quest!

Your game doesn’t need to be an RPG to have quests. On the contrary, even more casual games can give players quests and challenges as a way to keep them engaged. These can be anything from simple daily tasks and milestones to more involved multi-day efforts. The key is to add multiple layers with different rewards and degrees of difficulty, always giving players something to complete now and later.

• Milestones. These can be as simple as “Defeat 50 enemies” but add a layer of achievement into the game, making mundane tasks more rewarding. If the rewards are meaningful, they give players something to work towards throughout the game, and another reason to play again.

Getting social

While it can be easy to overlook, building social engagement features into your game can make a huge difference. The key is to make sure players are rewarded for bringing in their friends, without it feeling intrusive - remember, nobody likes spam.

• Social sharing rewards. One easy way to incentivize social sharing is by adding a mechanic that rewards players for inviting friends to the game. This can be anything from an exclusive reward to in-game currency.

• Competition. One large component to any well designed social game is the ability to compete against other players. This can be as simple as a leaderboard or a global ranking and adds another incentivize for players to keep coming back to your game.

Making it personal

Everyone likes a personal touch, especially if it’s part of the core game loop. Depending on your game, this can be anything from collectable outfits to customizable avatars and backgrounds. Personalized items give players a strong reason to come back and play and work with almost every game genre.

• Unlockable cosmetics. Regardless if you’re working on a casual or more hardcore game, unlocking items is always a great mechanic to keep players engaged. Having a robust set of unlockable content also helps add depth to your game. These can also be based on a number of different factors such as skill, achievements, or social sharing.

• Show it off. For games with more robust social functionality, having the ability to show off cosmetics is a big motivation for players. This can be especially powerful when combined with seasonal events, achievements, and other features.

Build in measurement tools

One important thing you want to plan during early development is how to effectively measure retention in your game. Building in tracking tools late in the dev cycle can be difficult, time-consuming, and downright annoying - not to mention less effective. We recommend watching this Indie XP Unite Now video for a sense of what to track and how to start building that into your game.

4. Summary

In this tutorial we explored some of the best ways to ensure new players are having a great experience in your mobile game. Alongside first time user experience, we looked at how to start building player retention and engagement methods during the early concept phase.

The next project in this course will cover the main production stage of development and the essential tools, services, and methodologies to set yourself up for commercial success.

• How to create a modern backend solution for your indie mobile game

• How to integrate monetization and a game economy organically into your game.

• How to create compelling engagement tools/methods.

• How to set up and manage success tracking in your indie mobile game.