Game review. Every day the same dream

Finishing our current project Apocalypse Dunk is taking a bit longer than we expected. We are still working hard polishing it and improving its gameplay.

In Ravalmatic, at the office, we love to analyze and review the games that for some reason we find interesting. I would like to talk about Apocalypse Dunk but since is not ready I’ll have to wait.

This week we discovered a brilliant little game that impressed us much.

Alarm buzzes!! Wake up, get dressed, kiss your wife, fight traffic, and go to work. Day in, day out, it’s always the same and nothing you can ever do will change that. Or will it?

Made in 2009 by Paolo Pedercini of Molleindustria, Every day the same dream is a game with a simple gameplay. The player just needs the left and right arrow keys for movement, and the space bar to interact with people and items when their name pops up at the bottom of the screen.

There is not a tutorial or any guiding on how to play. On other game that would account as a weakness and provoque players to quit. However, this lack of instructions is exactly what makes this game so appealing. The player himself needs to find out how to break the vicious circle.

The protagonist has no face, no personality, and yet there’s something about his situation that makes him instantly identifiable, someone to feel sympathy for. I almost felt a sense of desperation the longer I played as I tried to find something, anything, that would change his life for the better… or even at all.

Maybe if you play this original game and have the capacity to think out of the box you will discover its denouement. That can make your day unique too…

Game analytics

All our games use Playtomic stats. Playtomic is the equivalent of Google Analytics for games and is a great tool for game developers. With it we can go further than just knowing if someone has reached level 225 on Halloween Pairs.
Basically, Playtomic allows us to know on which sites our viral games are published, the geographical distribution of the players, the average time spent playing and how many hits the sponsor of the games gets. Besides this, we can custom it to track almost any kind of event relevant to the game play.
Practical example: How we improved Angry Bee with Playtomic
 
Some days after releasing Angry Bee on a couple of sites, we discovered that we were losing half of the players on level 3.

That wasn’t good. The game was more or less finished and at that point we wanted to avoid redesigning the levels. Nothing was wrong with them. The key issue was to improve the tutorial and reorder the levels. Firstly, we tried something simple.

Which effect would have swapping levels 3 and 4?

Bingo! Now the game retained 75% of the players and the play time increased.

Dealing with stats is not all about tracking the amount of plays of our games. If you use them wisely, they can help you to turn your game into a great hit by analyzing the players behavior.