Oni was a mobile gaming startup that I co-founded with other former Dell team mates. This was the golden age of puzzle games in the App Store (2014) and we aimed to get a slice of this market. My passion for the project and past experiences leading teams culminated in the decision to make me the company “frontman”. I also wore quite a set of hats: Product designer, sound designer, user research, pitch to venture capitalists and product owner.
During the whole time that Oni was in the global market, we have worked only for the mobile game Food Combo and the company was on the market between 2014 and 2018.
One of the most challenging parts for us was to integrate monetisation into the gameplay. “The gaming UX should not be interrupted by the store UX”, that was one of the mantras we had.
We built the store UX in a way that the user wouldn’t feel like every single time acquiring an in-game item is actually a money transaction. A real-money transaction breaks the gameplay and flow of the game, by adding another decision-making element into the whole equation.
To solve this particular issue we set two currencies. One in-game soft currency and hard currency (real money), an in-app economy practice that was more utilised in other types of games back then, such as League of Legends and Hearthstone.
The chosen skin for the soft currency in the game was the infamous chocolate coin. A symbolism that virtually anyone could associate both with food and money, globally. We often promoted Goldies (as we called the coins) giveaways in our social media channels as well as rewarding users with tasks in additional gaming modes, as a way of educating the user base on this matter.
If a freemium game wants to survive in the wild, it needs user retention. “The user acquisition costs aren’t getting any cheaper.” I’ve been hearing this very sentence on and on since 2013, year over year. And it’s the absolute truth.
After the brain transplant that was shifting the product mindset from conversion (our background with Dell up until then) to retention, we managed to find a sweet spot for our game that kept players engaged: Additional game modes.
The main game mode itself wasn’t enough to maintain a good number of monthly and daily active users. A significant portion of them got stuck into some hard levels and dropped engagement right after it, during initial beta tests.
Accessible from the same IA level than the main game mode (Food Tour), we added a section called Events, where users play the same game, but with different rules for goals.
The Sushi Festival required to score a specific number of calories (points) and rewarded the best in-game item: the wasabi. Fortune Time mode was time-based but rewarded with a lot of different in-game items and also soft currency, the harder the difficulty chosen, more reward probabilities and possibilities were set in our algorithm.
It took us quite a while to figure out the Consumables Strategy, adding game modes that reward players with our in-game soft currency (gold coins) or game consumables (power-ups). These consumables were portrayed as power-ups, helping users to progress throughout the main game mode.
To create a sense of scarcity and urgency, time caps were put into place. Sushi Festival being available only on weekends and Fortune Time once per day, everyday.
All these layers or additions (soft currency, consumables strategy and time caps) worked well together, increasing user engagement and retention from previous versions. After a few weeks of this update, users were not only playing at these secondary game modes, but also making more progress through the levels at the main game mode.
The whole idea behind this project was doing something that we would proud to do. What it could add to the puzzle game genre, at the time. And designing another “same-old game” with just a revamped skin wouldn't fulfil our aspirations.
With an original game mechanic, a very accessible tutorial was two touches away, regardless where the user was in menus or playing. The in-game tutorial also had sub-sessions for game modes and available power-ups.
The goal for the game mechanic that would not only bring something new but also work on user's pain points. In this case, the fact that significant amount of users miss the board tile that they intended to touch or drag at that particular moment.
Those unintended moves often lead them to lose a match, therefore, instant frustration. And then we are heading to the road of high bounce and low usage rates. A nightmare for a freemium game.
Mobile games are by nature, in the vast majority of cases, played single-handed, which reduces drastically click accuracy. That was the main UX pillar that we set when conceptualising this new game-mechanic: accurate and easy playing.
In the example above, a simple 5x5 board makes this difference very clear. Both in terms of accuracy for the desired interaction and decision making time for each move (complexity). The difficulty element relied on the goals for each level, number of piece types or board design.
