Greetings everyone!
Welcome to another Dev Diary. Today, we’re talking numbers. As you can see from the infographic below, we have loads of cool stats from the game.
These figures are super interesting to us—over 1 million runs this year already!—but they also help us make important decisions about the future.
We want to make sure that AtO is a game you keep coming back to, and that’s only possible with regular updates and DLC. To create this content, we need to learn about you, our players. That means understanding how, when, and why you play the game. And the key to that is data.
So, let’s spend a little time chatting about the stories behind these numbers, what they mean, and how we use them to continue making improvements.
Data power
Data is a really important tool for us. Together with your feedback, it allows us to look at how you play and make informed decisions about areas of the game that might need to be updated.
For example, our stats show us the death rates for each zone in the game. This information is helpful because it allows us to understand which zones might be too hard or unbalanced.
Some zones, generally the later ones, are intentionally more difficult to create more of a challenge as you progress. But while we want you to feel challenged, we don’t want you to feel frustrated or like the game is unfair. We need to keep that balance and data helps us to do that.
We can also see how often you select each character. If a character is hardly ever picked, that might tell us they are too underpowered compared to the rest. In this case, we might decide to buff their stats or change their mechanics to boost their power and make them more interesting for you to play.
On the other hand, if one character dominates and is picked a lot more than the others, it could show us that they are too OP or that another issue needs our attention. Here, we come back to the question of balance. If a character is too powerful, it makes the game easier than intended, and you might get bored quickly. Nobody wants that.
Corruptors are another good example. These difficulty modifiers give those of you playing Madness an extra challenge. If you take a look at our infographic, you’ll see which Corruptors are picked most often and which are chosen less frequently.
A Corruptor that isn’t picked very often could indicate that it’s too tricky or not fun. On the flip side, frequently chosen Corruptors are likely to offer the right level of challenge.
In future, we may add more Corruptors or change and improve the existing ones. When we do, we will use this data to make better design decisions about how they should work.
Your feedback
A crucial figure we want to discuss is MAU or Monthly Active Users. Simply put, this number tells us how many of you are playing each month.
MAU is vital for us because it tells us about the game's health. If this number falls over time, we need to investigate and find out why. If it's growing, we know we’re moving in the right direction.
This ties in neatly with the topic of player satisfaction and your feedback. We monitor many channels to understand how you feel about the game: our Discord, comments on YouTube, Steam discussion and reviews, social media, and more.
We collect your feedback and measure your sentiment everywhere you talk about the game. By fusing this feedback with stats like MAU, we build a complete picture of the game's state, what is working or not working, and the steps we need to take to ensure that we’re continuing to make the best game for you.
Surveys
Our data insights aren’t limited to what you see in the infographic. We can crunch numbers in all sorts of different ways to find answers to any kind of question about the game you can think of.
But data will often only tell you half the story. Numbers without context can be misleading, which is why we also gather your (invaluable!) feedback through player surveys.
Our surveys ask for your thoughts on all aspects of the game: what you like and dislike, whether you mainly play single-player or multiplayer, the content you’d like to see in the future, and lots more.
If you look at the infographic below, you’ll see that new heroes and pets are the most requested content. With limited options, the healer class has been crying out for a new hero, and our most recent survey's results back that up. So, guess what? ;)
Through surveys, you’ve also told us how you’d like future content to be packaged. Many of you would like mixed packs combining new heroes and stories. But there are also those of you who want content split by type.
We’ve heard you, and we think we have a solution that will please both sides. Our aim is for future DLC to be built in a way that gives you the power to decide what you want to add to your game.
Your opinions about DLC and how it should be packaged demonstrate that data is an overview. What we learn may not apply to all players, and we understand that.
When we combine the numbers with your thoughts from the surveys, we get the complete picture on content, packaging, game modes, things that work and don’t work—everything. Having the whole story allows us to make educated design decisions and keep improving.
Summing-up
Hopefully, we’ve given you a better understanding of how and why we use data. We want you to be happy with the game and as enthusiastic about its future as we are.
Finally, please continue to fill out our surveys, talk to us on Discord, discuss on Steam, and generally give your thoughts on the game anywhere you hang out online.
Your voice is important, and as we’ve shown, it directly influences the future of the game and its content.
Until next time!
- The Ato Team