Patreon Weekly #60 - July 27th 2020

Hey Patrons!

As promised, there’s a new content poll! This time we’re looking at some of the game’s existing challenges.

v0.8.2 is around 2 days out from going to beta, so let’s take a look at the final things I’ve been working on:

New Supporter Screen

As mentioned in the last weekly, the final major UI change coming in v0.8.2 is an overhaul to the game’s supporter UI:

The supporter system now has its own dedicated scene with some more modern visuals, and better emphasis on the links to various tiers. At the moment those tiers are using the same windows as before, but I might try to spruce that up (or at least improve the descriptive text) before release. All-in-all some polish is still needed here, but everything’s coming together nicely!

Some Changes on Google Play

In addition to all of this UI work, something else has been going on since the release of v0.8.1. Rather than the game itself, this is relating to the game’s discoverability on Google’s services.

To quickly catch everyone up, about 4 years ago Shattered was taken down for ‘impersonating’ Pixel Dungeon. I did manage to get this false ban rectified, but it seemed to have a permanent impact on the game’s discoverability on Google Play. Since that ban the Play Store has outright refused to recommend the game to users of similar apps (which is a big way apps are discovered), or to consistently rank Shattered for any search terms that aren’t its exact name.

I’ve been steadily working under this limitation for a while now, but suddenly that limitation is gone. I can’t explain exactly why, but now Shattered is eligible for all the discovery features other apps are, and all of the improvements I’ve made to the game over the last four years suddenly matter. Over the last two weeks Shattered’s user acquisition numbers have been, quite frankly, exploding:

As of yesterday we’re at about fifteen times Shattered’s old average new users per day, and that seems to be continuing to increase. That’s not all though, I’ve also recently heard back from Google about something else exciting:

The Google Play Games app regularly features games that can be installed quickly and played for free as ‘instant play games’, and Shattered has qualified! In addition to the obvious discoverability benefit this will provide, I’ve also taken the time to freshen up the game’s Google Play Games functionality in anticipation for this. The game is now more intelligent when it comes to sign in prompts (less spam), syncs the player’s journal, and will try to sign new users in on first launch if they have Google Play Games installed.

And, let’s not forget, all of this comes right as I’m working on an update that both improves the supporter system and makes the website (and by extension the Patreon) more visible to casual players. The timing could not possibly be better. I can’t really say anything for sure, but my hope is that after v0.8.2 releases this Patreon will grow by quite a bit!