Neopolis (Re)Build in Public: Week 3 — Deploying Key Changes and Fixing Onboarding
Hey everyone! We’ve been hard at work over the past few weeks, making some much-needed changes to Neopolis. From simplifying the game to reworking our monetization strategy, things are moving fast. This week, I wanted to give you an update on where we stand and dive into a new challenge that wasn’t on our radar two weeks ago: onboarding.
Where Are We Currently?
Today, we’re deploying the first batch of changes. We’ve made some of the quickest improvements to loosen up gameplay restrictions, removed all pay-to-win offers, and eliminated certain features that didn’t need to be done at the start of each season. (Yes, Neopolis is a seasonal game — each season lasts one month.)
We’re still working on the rest of the big removal I mentioned in the last article, which is set to be deployed on November 4th.
As of now, we haven’t seen significant improvements in the data yet, but the community remains enthusiastic and eager for these changes to roll out.
Onboarding: The New Urgent Focus
Another area that urgently needs our attention, which we hadn’t planned for two weeks ago, is onboarding. We put a lot of effort into the onboarding process two years ago, and honestly, I think we unintentionally let it fall off our radar. The feature is a bit messy and tough on the tech side, as it touches many parts of the configuration (missions, XP, etc.), so creating a globally coherent system takes a lot of brainpower.
However, our D1 retention has dropped significantly over the past year and is now sitting at around 20% — which is very low. Over the last three months, we collaborated with a publisher who handled user acquisition (UA), but they specialized in very casual games. Unfortunately, their approach didn’t align with Neopolis, which is more of a mid-core/hardcore game, and their inability to adapt had a big impact on our D1 retention numbers.
We wrapped up our collaboration at the end of last week, so we’ll be taking UA back into our own hands. However, this experience highlighted just how weak our onboarding process has become, and what was acceptable two years ago is no longer viable. So, improving onboarding has become my main focus this week. I already started rushing on it at the end of last week.
After reviewing the data, it’s clear where the biggest drop-off happens. Our onboarding process is too long, overly guided, and at times, incoherent. There’s too much text, and the main goal of the game — competition — is introduced too late. Players get bogged down with boring tasks that don’t make sense to them, and we lose their attention before they even understand what Neopolis is all about.
The Plan to Fix Onboarding
The goal is simple: make the onboarding process shorter, simpler, and introduce competition and social mechanics as early as possible.
I’m dedicating at least two days to finishing a version that I’m happy with, and then I’ll spend a full day doing live playtests at WeWork Stockholm (where I’m working at the moment). From past experience, we’ve learned that nothing beats live playtesting when it comes to improving onboarding. It’s been a while since we last did this, so I’m excited to see what insights we can gain.
The plan is to deploy the new onboarding version by Monday, October 28th. With the new UA strategy and onboarding changes, we’re aiming to improve our D1 retention to 35%. If we can achieve that in just a week, it would be a huge win.
Conclusion
We’re continuing to implement the changes I’ve discussed in previous articles, but we’ve also shifted our focus to improving the onboarding flow because the data made it clear that it needed immediate attention. While we are focusing on Web3 monetization, our D1 retention needs to be strong to grow the player base and make the game attractive on the Web3 side.
