So this time of year means next to no work gets done on the project (at least for me) so here is a small sampling of what has been added to the game.

Cannons! Inspired by the barrels in Donkey Kong Country.

The tracks for world 2 have been coming along nicely, and are nearly all functionally complete. Next is to to decorate and polish them and then it’s back to adding a few last minute features before concentrating on the home stretch.

Upcoming potential major things to be added:

• Sending items/money/gems between players
• Player Ghosts! (Race against your best times)
• Item set rewards
• Achievements

The plan is to finish up this round of features before going to beta and trying to promote the game/send to press and review sites. At this point 2/3rds of the content will be available, while the third planned world for the initial release can be worked on. If all goes well the aim is to be finished and ready to launch in April.

As a bonus here is a graph I decided to quickly throw together to get an idea on my player retention, and which levels may be too difficult and cause many players to quit.

I find it very interesting how many people actually failed to complete the first level of the game, either by it being too challenging or simply not compelling them enough to bother progressing. Its hard to say what the reason is, but out of approximately 800 people who bothered to actually load the screen to the main menu, 521 failed to log a time for the first track of the game. For some, it appears they failed to even hit play and have less than a minute or two logged into the game. I plan to do further analysis with the amount of time each user played, but for now, ignoring potential repeat profiles by the same IP address, over 500 people were not interested in playing level one. That isn’t a very good statistic, but there isn’t much I can do with it yet until I begin looking for more directed feedback on forums and other avenues. There is a somewhat steady decline in players each subsequent level as expected, with a few trouble spots where I see a lot of players dropping off. Its a small sample size so far, but every little bit helps when it comes to tweaking a game’s balance.

Thats all (probably) for this holiday season, so stay tuned to more updates in the new year.