We Released Iomante
On the 2nd of June 2016 we shared Iomante on /r/funny to a tune of about ten upvotes. Which seems disappointing, until we look at how many people actually played each chapter!
Google Analytics
As mentioned previously I added a lot of analytics to chapters one and two. Custom events will tell us how many people looked at the pages, how many people decided to play the game, and how many people actually finished the game. Each chapter was treated as a separate entity, so the analytics are split over both chapters. Sadly I’m not sure I can actually see how many people started from chapter one and finished chapter two, but as the link we shared went directly to chapter one and the end of chapter one links to chapter two we can safely assume that anyone playing chapter two got there from chapter one.
In the following sections I described people as having ‘finished’ a chapter. This refers to the fact that each chapter has one ending that actually progresses the story; the other endings all involve the death of a character and end the story.
Chapter One
Numbers
- People that viewed the web page: 872
- People that started chapter one: 571
- People that died: 55
- Times someone died and tried again: 48 (this is not 48 people, but 48 clicks of the Start Over button. Could have just been one really determined person.)
- People that finished: 262
- Times people finished: 281 (this is how many times the ‘wake up’ button was clicked.)
Analysis
Of the 872 people that visited chapter one, 65.5% actually started to play it. Considering that /r/funny is mainly pictures, this isn’t really surprising.
45.9% of that 65.5% actually finished it, and at least one person played chapter one more than once.
So, of the 872 people that visited chapter one, 30% played the whole chapter, and of the 571 people that started chapter one, 45.9% played the whole chapter.
Lessons
For chapter two we added a rewind button upon death that takes you back to the decision that lead you down that path. This means that anyone that died in chapter one would likely not have felt compelled to start again, and that they would not have been presented with the link to chapter two that only appears upon completion of the ‘correct’ ending. Adding the rewind button could have turns more of those 55 deaths into completions of the chapter.
Chapter Two
Numbers
- People that viewed the web page: 214
- People that actually started chapter two: 166
- Times people started chapter two: 175
- People that died: 48
- Times People died: 67
- People that rewound upon death: 62
- People that finished: 80
- Times people finished: 80
Analysis
262 people finished chapter one, and 214 people arrived at chapter two’s page, so presumably 48 people saw the link to chapter two and thought ‘nah’. 81.7% of people decided to click though.
Of the 214 people that visited chapter two, 77.6% actually started to play it, so another 48 people (weird) got that far and then thought ‘nah’. However, at least one person did start it more than once, so that’s cool.
48 people died 67 times, and hit rewind 62 times. Given how far into chapter two some of the deaths are, without rewind we woud undoubtedly have lost some players.
Of the 214 people that visited chapter two, 37.4% completed it, and of the 166 people that started chapter two, 48.2% completed it. Nobody completed it twice.
Of the people that started chapter one, 14% finished chapter two.
Lessons
We had the rewind feature in chapter two, so I feel that anyone that got this far but didn’t start or didn’t finish stopped because they didn’t find the game engaging enough to keep playing to completion.
Feedback
We did receive one piece of feedback that was quite interesting. /u/bazola5 said that while they enjoyed the game, they were frustrated by the way the game presents interesting scenarios (a bear is trying to make you go somewhere) but then forces you to pay attention to something else instead (picking the colour of your socks). Thinking about this made me realise that we had written chapter two entirely to entertain ourselves, which isn’t surprising as that’s what we did with chapter one and people asked us to write more.
Chapter one was written in one day with zero planning. Chapter two presented a chance to take a bit more time and write something bigger, but ran the risk of compromising the quality by allowing us more time to overthink what we’d written. While we did make a few edits to previously written sections that we feel resulted in a tighter story we definitely didn’t write with how a wider audience would receive the story in mind, which resulted in things like the sock section. We found it funny, and we did receive some positive feedback about that section and others like it, but we can also see why some people would find being forced into that boring after being presented with something much more compelling.
Now What
If this were a mobile game then it would be on an app store and have a chance of being discovered by people organically and thus potentially continue to be played by people. It could even, somehow, become ranked as similar to a popular game and boosted to the front of the store via the whim of distant algorithms. As Iomante is just some website, nobody’s really going to find it without us continuing to promote it.
/r/funny was never going to latch onto Iomante and propel it to the front page because this isn’t the kind of content that does well on /r/funny. We found some multiple choice adventure game related subreddits and shared Iomante on those but we got a minimal amount of views as they weren’t terribly large communities.
As fun as it was to write, Iomante is a vanity project, so we’re not going to spend any more time actively promoting it, but it’s nice to have something on the website other than my blog, and it’s definitely been nice to finish something for a change.
Now that the tools are in place (analytics and so on) writing a third chapter should be easier than the second chapter was, so that will happen some time. Until then, thanks for reading, and if you played Iomante, thanks for playing!