Three things we learned shipping our third game

By the NeonPlay Studios team

Puzzle Adventure is the third game we've shipped as a team. Each one taught us something we wish we'd known earlier.

1. Ship the dumbest thing that works

Our first game was over-engineered. We built our own analytics, our own crash reporter, our own asset pipeline. We spent four months on infrastructure and shipped late. The game itself was great. Almost no one saw it.

For Puzzle Adventure we used boring tools for everything that wasn't the game itself. Off-the-shelf analytics, hosted crash reporting, standard build pipelines. We shipped in eleven weeks. The game's playing fine.

2. Talk to ten players before redesigning anything

We used to redesign based on metrics. A screen had low engagement, so we redesigned it. Eighty percent of the time, the redesign performed worse. We were guessing at the cause.

Now: before any redesign, we get on calls with five to ten players who use that screen. The pattern almost always becomes obvious within three calls. Cheaper, faster, and the redesigns actually work now.

3. Simpler is almost always better

Every time we've shipped a "richer" version of something, it underperformed the simpler version. Every time. We've stopped trying to argue with this data.

The corollary: if you can't explain what a feature does in one short sentence, you probably haven't simplified it enough yet.

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