After our last release, we decided the next stated goal should be improving the abandonment rate of the ‘Avoid’ mission in our game (see previous blog). The purpose of this mission was to teach players that the world had Newtonian mechanics, that an engine acting off-center-of-mass causes rotational acceleration.
However, to win the mission, the player needed to: add components via a build menu, connect some components, and then had to press play. All that before passively observing the outcome. There was too many steps and people were confused and quit. The feedback loop was too long and the …