Neopolis (Re)Build in Public: Week 4— Rushing Onboarding Improvements and Bringing Back Seasonal Play
What We Achieved Last Week
Last week, Flo, our talented mobile developer (and the best when it comes to animations), continued pushing through tasks for the next big version. He also took the time to brainstorm some exciting improvements, thinking through how to animate key actions in the game. I can’t wait to see these come to life!
Nathan (co-founder and backend developer) has been equally busy, pushing forward with the next version, engaging with the community, and making big gameplay decisions alongside Marie (our game director). Meanwhile, Marie has been deep into balancing for the upcoming season, which is a big task with all the changes we’re rolling out. 💪
On my end, I created a new version of the onboarding as planned.
I decided to make the onboarding shorter and more focused on competition. Since onboarding wasn’t in the initial plans, I had to rush a bit and only managed to conduct two live playtests. But those two sessions were really valuable! Here’s my note from one of the playtests:
After each playtest, I immediately fixed anything that was confusing or didn’t work well. This process was incredibly helpful. When I first finished the onboarding updates, I thought, “Great, it’s almost perfect!” But putting it in the hands of new users quickly highlighted important issues and inconsistencies. So it turned out to be a great exercise. I wish I’d had time for more sessions, but I needed to complete the main version for the following week.
I deployed the new onboarding on Friday, October 25th (I know the rules, but we’re on a tight schedule right now 😂). It’s still too early to fully analyze retention, but here’s an interesting result so far:
Before, it took players 20–30 minutes to discover the leaderboard, which is the main goal of the game. Now, that’s down to less than 4 minutes.
I’m hopeful this will help players understand the game better and stick around longer! 🤞
This Week’s Objectives
This week, we need to push hard to complete the changes we planned three weeks ago. Everything has to be deployed on Monday, so the version needs to be submitted for review by Friday morning at the latest.
We’re aiming for two days of testing, which is short but necessary to keep our timeline on track. It’s going to be a tough week, but we’re up for it! 💪
Oh, and we made another big decision: Neopolis will become a seasonal game again.
This means the game will reset (buildings, coins) every month to keep the competition fresh and fair. The community seems happy to see this mechanic return! A few players expressed concerns about losing their buildings again, so we’ll look into ways to make this change as smooth as possible for them.
See you next week! 👋
