As I promised, here we go. In the first 500,000 plays of Tribulation, we have learned a lot. A lot a lot. Lets start with a biggie.

Sponsorship works. It really does. Just counting some quick stats and we sent (well) over 100k visitors to the sponsors site. (Intentionally vague on actual numbers there, and the numbers below isn’t close to the real sum of visitors sent to the sponsors site). For the price of the sponsorship, that’s not a bad deal for the sponsor. Links that we thought were boring and that nobody really clicks on actually work. 10,000 people click the in-game logo in the bottom left corner. We suspected next to none would click it. The logo on the game over screen? 40,000 clicked that. The More Games Button on the Main Menu? 24,000 clicked that. There seems to be a pretty large conversion rate for links out that are present in many parts of the game.

Credits Screens Work. Ish. Of course, the worst part of them is that you miss anyone who doesn’t click credits or care about them. We were able to give attribute to the many people who helped work on our game including the music sources, icon source, and music designer/engineer.

People Stick to the End. Even when grinding, some stick to the end and get the best possible upgrade. 13,000 purchases were made to Pandora’s Box. That is really hard to get to for most people without closing the game first or dying. It was nice to know that these people stuck around and, in my opinion, beat the game like that. 250,000 or so people played a full game. They died at some point. The rest didn’t quite make it.

Players Don’t Care Where the Gun Points. The average accuracy from 250,000 sample games was 63%. The best part is that the lowest percent anyone got was 2%. Obviously if you have infinite ammo, no one cares if you hit those zombies in the beginning or not. As a player, I always hated the ammo constraints, so we chose not to include them in this game, and rather make reloading part of the strategy.

There are 19,000,000 less zombies out there. 250,000 players killed 19,081,879 zombies. That doesn’t even count the rest of the players who didn’t end the game. The average zombies per game killed was 76, and the most zombies killed in a game was 26,332. Congrats to that person!

Cool Developer Splash Screens Are Nice. With the lack of planning and time, we chose to implement a static slick splash screen (which we have since animated). From this, we were able to get 20,000 people visit our blog.

Now for some graphs!

With the discussion up there, I decided to chart the links we had from our Credits Menu. I also have a heatmap, if anyone is interested that I can post. A lot of theory can go here. I think placement and interest was the largest factors of out going links. Game Design and Art was obviously a large part of the game and so it got the most links out. I was still surprised that the Special Thanks links got out. As a guess, I would say that many of those players knew what those sites were and used them actively.

It’s pretty obvious about weapon distribution. Interestingly enough, people hung on to buy the higher priced items. Pandora’s Box was picked much less often than the Minigun, despite only being priced moderately higher. Possibly because everyone knows what a Minigun does. No one knew what Pandora’s Box did. On the topic of Pandora’s Box, we messed up on that one. The weapon is essentially useless compared to a Minigun. A more powerful and predictable weapon should have been offered.

The Shotgun and Chainsaw were the first few guns available to the player since they were priced cheaply. It seems that ranged weapons are more fun than close up weapons, since it appears unlikely that the 10,000 purchase difference would drop out between the time those two weapons were both purchase-able.

Finally, I wanted to thank Playtomic for most of our analytics. Even though you went down on us for a day and graph a lot of stats funny, we still love you and want you. I encourage all new developers to check out their platform if they want to start recording game statistics.