Obby in a Ball Overview
Team Size: Solo development project
Time Spent on Project: 6 weeks
Platforms: Roblox (Phone, Tablet, Desktop)
Obby in a Ball is a traditional Roblox platformer (Obby) where players navigate while rolling inside of a ball. Inspired by Super Monkey Ball, players race against the clock to complete obstacle courses and earn medals for their fastest times.
Release Date: Feb 2024
Avg Mobile Session Time: 6.3 Minutes
User Acquisition & Development Strategy
Obby in a Ball was a project designed for success in an increasingly competitive user acquisition environment on the Roblox platform. After learning from the failures of Pixel Miners and Ball Legends and mentorship from successful developers, a new strategy for genre selection was used for this game.
Given the de-prioritization of the “Popular” list and increasing CPI on Roblox, the goal of this strategy is centered around surfacing the game through Roblox’s home screen recommendations. With Roblox’s massive platform DAU count, being identified by the recommendation algorithm can lead to large amounts of no-cost concurrent user. The algorithm prioritizes several KPIs such as CTR, session time, and D1 retention. A developer can get noticed by the algorithm by running a low number of ads for a sustained period of time and meeting certain criteria in terms of KPI benchmarks. ARPDAU for the 90th percentile of Roblox games is about $0.025 USD (before Roblox applies a 65% tax). With CPI between $0.01 - $0.04 USD, being recognized by the algorithm is critical to success for most games.
With this information in mind, the following steps were taken during development to maximize the probability of success:
Step 1: Ad Conversion Testing & Genre Selection
CPI testing was used as a critical part of the genre selection processes. This data-informed approach ensured that the CTR requirements for the recommendation algorithm would be met and confirmed player interest in the game genre. First, several game concepts were developed and dummy landing pages were created for each. All concepts were then ad tested with blank game files for users to enter. Two games stood out during this process, Obby in a Ball and Bike Down a Hill:
Bike Down a Hill
Click Through Rate: 2.29%
Install Conversion Rate: 1.35%
Obby in a Ball
Click Through Rate: 2.59%
Install Conversion Rate: 1.58%
Both of these ads were vast improvements from the 0.23% CTR achieved by Pixel Miners. This success came from a combination of targeting mobile users, improved game genre selection, and utilizing an art style that fit better with the Roblox market. With more colorful and expressive art and a concept that took advantage of trending Obby games on the platform, a successful marketing strategy was ensured before development began. Obby in a Ball was selected because it required fewer 3D assets and animation for a single developer.
Step 2: 4 Weeks of MVP Development
The Pixel Miners software framework was used to make development fast and easy for one developer. Since the Roblox recommendation system focuses on short-term metrics, only the minimum amount of content was created to start feeding the algorithm as soon as possible.
Weeks 1-2: Gameplay physics
Week 3: UI & progression systems
Week 4: Level & 3D asset creation + QA
Step 3: Data Collection & Gameplay Tuning
Obby in a Ball released on February 3, 2024 and $20 USD of daily advertising was run for a 2-week period. Starting with an average session time of 5.3 minutes and D1 retention of 6.85% on day 1, drastic changes to gameplay and the new user experience were needed in order to be recognized by the Roblox recommendation system.
Obby (platformer) games are simple and ubiquitous on Roblox, so they do not benefit from new user tutorials. Development time was spent instead on difficulty tuning, level design, and progression rewards in order to impact the new user experience. Using funnel analysis, 2 key issues with player churn were identified for the initial release build:
Only 47% of users completed the first level. A hypothesis was formed that higher completion rates could lead to better new user playtime.
Only 4.6% of new users were still playing after 20 minutes during their first session. A hypothesis was formed that better progression rewards would incentivize users to stay for longer.
Several actions were taken during the game’s soft launch to address these issues:
Difficulty for the first 3 levels was significantly reduced and all new levels were created based on these difficulty standards.
Enhanced rewards were added based on the player’s level completion times. This was meant to enhance the game’s replay value as players competed to achieve certain time trial milestones.
A new ball was granted at the end of level 1 and daily rewards were granted every 24 hours in order to incentivize greater D1 retention.
These changes were successful in improving level completion rates and reducing churn during the first 10 minutes of gameplay and the average session time for the game’s final build was 6.3 minutes. Reaching this level of engagement is a significant accomplishment for a solo developer on the Roblox platform. However, with the game’s KPIs performing just above the 50th percentile, it was not sufficiently surfaced by the recommendation algorithm and the project was discontinued after its soft launch.