Neopolis (Re)Build in Public: Week 5 — Assessing Our Progress and What’s Next
Review
This week, I’m assessing the impact of our initial gameplay and onboarding changes.
Our retention improvement isn’t as significant as we’d hoped — it’s only increased by 1 or 2%, bringing us to around 23% D1. However, it does look like it’s trending upward, so we’re cautiously optimistic. There also seems to be some weird behavior in our data that I don’t fully understand yet. When I check D1 retention at the end of the user creation process, it’s around 35–40%, which is promising.
But we’re losing about 30% of new users between the first app open event and the automatic sign-in (which happens right after the app opens, thanks to our integration with game services). This is strange, and I need to dig deeper into what’s causing this drop-off before we can reliably track our user data in the coming weeks.
Even though our onboarding rework hasn’t had a massive impact on overall retention yet, there’s one big win: the percentage of users discovering the leaderboard has jumped from 46% to 85%! While this hasn’t translated into immediate retention gains, it’s a solid foundation for showing the main objective of the game and will be valuable for future improvements.
As for our gameplay changes, it’s still early to see measurable effects, but the feedback from our hardcore player community has been positive, which is an encouraging sign.
What We Achieved Last Week
Last week, we pushed through all the major changes that had been planned weeks in advance. It was tough, but the entire team gave 120%, and we managed to complete everything! 🙌🏼
We deployed the updates today, and so far, everything seems pretty stable. I was expecting a flood of urgent bugs, but surprisingly, our code held up well. Given the tight timeline we had for development, this was a pleasant surprise.
As a reminder, Neopolis is now a seasonal game again! We’ve reintroduced seasons, which reset buildings and coins every two weeks. This change is designed to make the game more competitive, dynamic, and better suited for mid-core and hardcore players, keeping the gameplay fresh and engaging. Additionally, we’ve worked to remove pay-to-win mechanics. In-app purchases (IAPs) are now focused solely on offering convenience rather than giving players a competitive edge.
This Week’s Objectives
This week, our primary goals are to fix any minor bugs, monitor user feedback on the new gameplay, and make quick improvements — not just on the tech side, but also in terms of balancing and game design.
We also have several interface upgrades to tackle, starting with a redesign of the ranking page. As the centerpiece of the game, it needs to be clear and engaging, so we’ll be focusing on making it as clean and attractive as possible.
Here is a first draft of it :
I think we need one more week to fine-tune these changes before diving into the Web3 monetization strategy we discussed in previous articles.
See you next week — hopefully with some good data to share!
