Pixel Miners Overview

Pixel Miners is a game about uncovering buried artifacts, raising pets that help you mine, and building hangouts to share with friends. The game expands on the Roblox mining simulator genre by encouraging team-based mining and allowing players to customize their gameplay style with unique pet abilities.

Developer: Balanced Games

Team Size: 4 full-time, 3 part-time developers

Time Spent on Project: 24 Months

Platforms: Roblox (Phone, Tablet, Desktop)

Release Date: Aug 2023

Peak CCU: 2,500

Avg Mobile Session Time: 6.7 min

Ryan’s Roles: Product Manager, Creative Director, Game Designer

Summary of Contributions

While leading a team of 6 developers, Ryan served as the product manager, creative director, and game designer:

  • Product Management: Ryan built the business case for Pixel Miners and ensured a clear product vision that met player needs within the Roblox market. He also planned the software framework used for all Balanced Games titles, managed production timelines, marketed the game, and used player data to make gameplay improvements.

  • Creative Direction: The Pixel Miners’ world, characters, and art style was based on Ryan’s creative vision. From creating concept art to managing production workflows, Ryan worked closely with the art team to ensure a cohesive theme throughout the game’s assets and levels.

  • Game Design: Ryan designed Pixel Miners’ gameplay, progression systems, and level layouts. He programmed the gameplay prototype, greyboxed all levels, and created spreadsheets to manage the player economy and progression.

Continue reading for a full case study of the Pixel Miners development process.


Pixel Miners Case Study

Concept Development

Selecting a genre was the first step in creating Pixel Miners. Given Ryan’s expertise on Roblox as a content analyst and the platform’s accessibility for small teams, options were limited to the Roblox market. The goal was to identify a genre that met the following criteria:

  • Proven Mechanics: Core mechanic appears in at least 1 top Roblox game

  • Opportunities for Innovation: Clear hypothesis could be created on how to meet player needs better than competitors

  • Low competition: 3 or fewer competitors with 1K+ concurrent users

  • Limited Scope: Able to be produced by a team 3-4 developers in 6 months

The mining simulator genre was identified as a great fit based on these goals. The genre focuses on Minecraft-style digging mechanics where players mine for resources that help them purchase faster digging tools. Treasure Hunt Simulator is a great example of this.

Key player pain points were then identified for the genre:

  1. Competition for Resources: Mining simulator progression is single-player and users must compete with others to mine a shared pool of resources. This often causes frustration for new players when their resources are stolen.

  2. Linear Gameplay: With only 2 ways to dig (pickaxes or explosives), mining simulators offer little variation in gameplay mechanics.

  3. No End-Game Content: The genre offers offers no content for end-game players. For most games, once all tools are purchased, rebirthing is the only end-game option.

Pixel Miners gameplay was then developed with the goal of solving these issues:

  1. Team-Based Gameplay: The objective of each round is to work with other players to excavate a buried artifact. Team bonuses are granted at the end of the round based on how much of the artifact was uncovered and how many players participated.

  2. Pet Abilities: Pets with passive buffs, active mining abilities, and player movement abilities were added to offer a more varied and customizable gameplay experience.

  3. Creative Mode: A build mode was planned as end-game content. Players could use the resources they mined to create their own artifacts and excavate them with friends.

Core & End-Game Loops

Players working together to excavate an artifact

Planning & Pre-Production (Jan - Nov 2022)

Prior to hiring a full development team, Ryan created design documentation for all aspects of the game. This allowed for a clear understanding of headcount needs and allowed the team to move quickly once production began. These documents ranged from high-level presentations to detailed specifications and included an overview of:

  • Game concept

  • Gameplay mechanics, rules & progression

  • Story, world & art style

  • 3D asset requirements

  • Development roadmap

  • Headcount & budget requirements

  • Tech & analytics

During this time, important gameplay design principles were established in order to ensure a strong fit for the Roblox market. Pixel Miners is meant to progress similarly to most Roblox simulator games with mining gameplay inspired by the casual combat of games like Maplestory, Mr. Diller, and Bomberman. Three key concepts were created:

  1. Mining should center around 2-3 repetitive actions. With a high number of mobile users on Roblox, core gameplay should be kept simple.

  2. Satisfying feedback for each action through animation and VFX is critical to attracting new users on the platform.

  3. Users should be rewarded frequently during each session so they feel they have become significantly more powerful during the session.

Ryan created prototypes for both story and creative modes to test the game’s concept with these princples, gain a better understand all development workflows, and communicate more effectively with the development team once production began.

Story Mode Gameplay Prototype

Creative Mode Menu Prototype

Roblox simulator games require many 3D assets since progression centers around continuously earning new equips and pets. A 3D artist and co-creator was hired in July 2022 in order to establish the game’s art style and design principles as well as begin creating assets prior to full production.

The specifics of the game’s world and story were developed during this time. In Pixel Miners, players use their space ship to explore a broken metaverse planet. Players travel to destroyed chunks of the planet in order to excavate and save the buried artifacts they find there. The game attempted to stand out from the Roblox market with a unique cute-cyberpunk art style and worlds that were fun to explore.

Story & World Design Presentation

Final World Map

Design guidelines and color palettes for the game’s world and 3D assets were also established. Creating these principles early allowed us to move faster during production when additional headcount was hired.

Pet Design Presentation

Pet Variant Sample

Production (Nov 2022 - Jul 2023)

In November 2022 full production of Pixel Miners began. A programmer and a second 3D artist were hired full-time and part-time VFX and UI artists were utilized as needed. The Roblox player community is very accepting of community testing during game development. Therefore, production focused on building a vertical slice with 6-9 hours of story mode gameplay.

After vertical slice completion, the game would then be soft-launched and marketed as “Pixel Miners Beta”. New features and progression changes would then be implemented based on player feedback and analytics. Additional story mode content and creative mode would be released post-launch.

Project Management

From production timelines to feature specifications, Ryan managed all aspects of the Pixel Miners team development process. He coordinated between art, programming, design, and user acquisition workflows to bring the game from concept to release. The team worked in monthly sprints during production with testing at the end of each major system implementation. 2-week sprints were adopted after release with items prioritized by impact to user engagement.

High-Level Production Roadmap

Creative Mode Asset Requirements

With production taking 3 months longer than expected, important lessons were learned about project and people management during this time:

  1. Trust & Accountability: From new hires misrepresenting their skill sets to employees working on personal projects, building a system of trust and accountability became extremely important in bringing the project to completion. Employees needed to have confidence in the product vision and understand the consequences of missed deadlines in order to ensure all team members contributed their fair share of the workload.

  2. Managing Scope & Feature Creep: Pixel Miners was over-scoped from the beginning and new features were often proposed between sprints. Focusing only on what was important for the player experience was necessary to ensure a timely release.

  3. Understanding Workflows: Without prior development experience, timelines were difficult to estimate. Working closely with each team member allowed Ryan to become more accurate at building timelines as development progressed.

These lessons proved invaluable in ensuring that future projects were delivered on time and within budget, with Ball Legends production completed in just 6 weeks.

Level Design & Visual Direction

During production, Ryan worked closely with the art team to create a cohesive visual style for all world, pet, and equipment art. He developed level layouts and visuals together to ensure that worlds met core gameplay needs while also providing sufficient incentive for players to explore the game’s unique environments.

Using a combination of sketches and reference art, Ryan created the concepts for most assets in order to enforce the design principles created during pre-production

Gameplay & Progression Design

Ryan created economy/progression spreadsheets to model expected playtime and design specification documents outlining animation/VFX sequences in order to satisfy the principles outlined during pre-production. Analytics were put in place to compare actual vs. expected player behavior and tune progression based on live data.

Gacha Price Planning by Player Level

Final Gacha Prices & Drop Rates

DPS & Cooldown Planning for Pixel Beam Ability

Pixel Beam Ability VFX by Tier

User Acquisition

July - October 2023 Release

Between July and October 2023, the team began acquiring users for Pixel Miners Beta and iterating on the game with a small player community. The initial plan for UA was to use the strategy common for many top Roblox games prior to 2023:

  1. Run large volumes of on-platform ads for a short period of time in order to reach Roblox’s prominently featured “Popular” games list

  2. If the game was retentive enough, no further advertising spend would be needed as the Popular list would provide large amounts of no-cost UA

  3. With CPIs often under $0.02 USD and ARPDAU of $0.025 for 90th percentile games, ad spend outside of the Roblox platform was neither necessary nor cost effective for games on indie budgets

Unfortunately, UA is where Pixel Miners struggled the most. Together, several factors led to 15x higher CPI than expected:

  1. The team was unable to create marketing art that resonated with the Roblox market

  2. The Popular list was de-prioritized on the platform, so it could no longer act as a significant source of UA for top games

  3. Advertising for under-13 users was removed from the platform in 2023 following an FTC complaint. This disabled ads for about 50% of the platform’s users

  4. The Roblox desktop app, which removed most advertising spots for the device type, was launched in 2022

July 2023 Ad Performance

(1 Robux = ~$0.01 USD)

The team was unsure about the primary causes for the campaign’s poor performance at the time. User demographic data on the platform is unreliable and AB testing for ads is not supported. So, with the game’s initial session time and D1 retention in the 50th percentile, further ad spending could not be justified (more on this in the next section). The primary hypothesis was that users were no longer interested in the mining simulator genre and the team decided to move on to create Ball Legends, Obby in a Ball, and other unreleased prototypes as a way to test this hypothesis.

July 2024 Release

During this break from Pixel Miners, Ryan gained a better understanding of how to create attractive marketing art for Roblox users and learned of new strategies to acquire users at low cost. With the Roblox recommendation algorithm replacing the Popular list, platform ads can now be used as a low-cost method to get noticed by the algorithm and begin receiving large numbers impressions to offset Roblox’s low ARPDAU and high platform tax of 75%. With the algorithm prioritizing content with high CTRs, session times, and retention, games must meet a certain percentile ranking in order to be chosen.

In July 2024, a new advertising campaign was created to test this new strategy with Pixel Miners. By targeting mobile users and improving marketing art, the game achieved a 16.5x higher conversion rate (play rate):

7/23/24 Ad Performance (1 Ad Credit = ~$0.01 USD)

Likely due to the game’s genre, these ads did not perform as well as Obby in a Ball or Ball Legends. However, Pixel Miners achieved 2,500 peak concurrent users with just $20 USD of daily ad spend during this campaign and a new effort to improve gameplay metrics began.

7/23/24 CCU Record & Median Session Time

Results & Live Operations

For both the tests in July - October 2023 and later release in July 2024, data analysis was an important part of the team’s strategy for improving the game during live operations. Top level KPIs and detailed funnel metrics were tracked by game build, device type, and user demographics upon release. A combination of trend analysis, AB testing, and community feedback collection was used to understand player behavior and make changes to the game.

July - October 2023 Release

In July 2023, Pixel Miners Beta released with average session time and D1 retention metrics in the 50th percentile compared to the top 10,000 Roblox games. Monetization on Roblox is very difficult for games outside of the 90th percentile in engagement metrics. This meant that the team’s strategy required significant gameplay changes in order to move from an initial playtime of 7.6 minutes per DAU to its goal of 15+ minutes. The team’s focus was rapid iteration during this time and new ads were run on a monthly basis for 3-4 days in order to collect feedback from users.

By collecting written player feedback, analyzing player churn rates, and reviewing progression funnels, 3 important issues were identified with the release build:

  1. In most mining simulators, players mine downward into a bottomless pit. Players were unaware of the game’s artifact excavation mechanic and confused when they found the mining pit was not bottomless.

  2. There was no variation in the rewards received for mining blocks. This made gameplay boring and repetitive compared to other simulators, especially to players unaware of the artifact excavation rewards.

  3. Progression was too slow, with earn times for new tools much higher than expected in the game’s progression model.

The team responded with several changes to address these issues:

  1. To serve as a visual indication of the game’s objective, glowing textures were added to all blocks surrounding the artifact. VFX showing the rewards players earned for for excavating the artifact were added. All artifacts began the round partially excavated.

  2. To introduce more variation in the mining experience, randomly spawning treasure chests with currency rewards were added to the mining pit.

  3. Progression was tuned to guarantee users could earn a new tool within the first 5 minutes of play.

These changes had a significant positive impact on engagement, with average playtime per DAU increasing from 7.6 minutes to 10.3 minutes (+35%):

Beta 1.0.0 DAU & Playtime

Beta 1.1.0 DAU & Playtime

The team continued with this process of data collection and iteration until October 2023. However, further improvements in playtime and retention were not achieved with additional changes. With advertising CPIs significantly higher than expected, the game would need to produce ARPDAU well above the 90th percentile in order to profitably acquire users. This seemed very unlikely given Pixel Miners’ engagement data. For these reasons, the development team size was reduced and Balanced Games moved on to develop Ball Legends.

July 2024 Release

After several months working on other titles and prototypes, Ryan learned a tremendous amount about successfully marketing games and implementing more sophisticated analytics. With 20-30x lower CPI than the prior release, hope of finding a viable business strategy for Pixel Miners was renewed. An AB test infrastructure was introduced to the game and is currently being used to make improvements with the goal of increasing new user playtime and D1 retention.

For example, it was recently identified that 48% of churn is occurring within the first 3 minutes and only 49% of users mine their first block. Results for a July 22, 2022 play test showed the following results for 1,064 new users:

This led to a hypothesis that UI load times could be significantly impacting churn rates. UI assets are loaded after players join a game session on Roblox and can take several minutes to load for users with low internet bandwidth or low-end devices. Currently, a menu allowing players to choose a starter pet is immediately shown to new users. During UI loading, this menu obscures the player’s view of the rest of the game. There is no option within the Roblox engine to wait for game UI to load, so an AB test was run that removes this feature and automatically equips a starter pet. The variant sacrifices player choice in order to allow time for the client to load UI assets. The goal was to increase new user playtime by getting users to the core game loop faster.

The test was run for 3,352 new users using the Bayesian AB testing method. The variant was shown to have a very low probability of being better than the control (13%) and the goal of testing was to significantly increase playtime (looking for changes that produce 10%+ increases or better). Therefore, the starter pet auto-equip feature was not adopted.

While team size has been reduced to just 2 part-time developers (Ryan and co-creator, VintageWarm), the team continues to test and improve Pixel Miners to resolve the new user playtime issue.