A Moment of Your Time
If you ask me how long it takes to complete SparkLine’s launch content compared to other games in the market, I will answer “A Moment of Your Time“. Very simple – those other games are already around for some time, and we are just starting out. In that case, what little content we have must be enticing enough for you to keep wanting for more.
This blog post too (and perhaps many others in the future) will be comparatively short to some of the previous ones so that you can digest the information quickly.
The "Hook" - 5 Seconds to Convince You
Before you play the game, you look at the game. If what you are looking at is not worth it, then there’s no download.
In a game marketing discord server I frequent, 5 seconds is often touted as the moment of your time you have to convince people to look all the way until the end. Everything that I think will interest you must be seen there. What do we have for SparkLine… Gameplay? Story? Pets (haha)? We’ll show you quick.
The latter, in particular, certainly has a place in the World of Spark. Remember this artwork before that was used in the next song announcement voting on Twitter?
We’ll announce the song in due time, but we’ll certainly be able to answer questions of “Can you pet the cat/dog?”. Also, although rarely spoken about, I do like to delve into the topic of guide dogs. Please look forward to the implementation.
Beyond the Introduction
Once you are hooked into the game, you will keep going until the current content ends… Hopefully!
Realistically, in free mobile games only a small percentage of players kept on going beyond the initial 5 minutes or so. That means you must not overstay your welcome. It already took effort to download the game, so make sure this moment of their time is worth it for them. If they stop there then perhaps it’s not their cup of tea at that point in time. In that case, investigate why it doesn’t work out, and take steps to improve.
Sometimes I hear things like “it gets better later” but it’s not a good excuse. What you see at the start is the most important. “It gets better later” should remain true, but to a higher starting standard. I do admit I sound like hot air stating this before the game launches, but what I say definitely applies to our game as well. Whether it’s the good or bad, we’ll see.
Stay for the Show
What keeps you coming back even though you have completed the base (surface) content? The most common answer is further content. Rhythm games… are good for completionists if they look for high scores, but I expect very few to remain for this purpose.
It is okay for us if you feel the game is complete for you after unlocking everything because… that’s what it is. If your last session ended with a smile, that’s the best thing for us. We are a good game for you, then.
We can look towards time-limited events and the FOMO (fear of missing out) it brings or even daily logins but I really don’t think these are things we should concern with at the moment. Sometimes I feel even logging in for daily bonuses is a chore, much less doing the daily quests. That’s a feeling I don’t want to have for our game.
What’s the focus right now? To have a good game first, of course!
Other Updates
We are currently hard at work preparing the story and progression of the game. This blog post is my personal concerns to what we are doing at the moment. I apologize that we don’t have screenshots to show you at the moment, but we hope to be more active by next month.
Speaking of which, we are on the way to updating our note designs, which takes the feedback from the previous beta test into account. Once these are done, we will be able to roll out gameplay videos again. And boy, we certainly can’t wait to show you!
I am also trying my best to shorten blog posts so that they are faster for you to digest. Referring to that Sakurai video above, it should be better this way. On the upside, these blog posts will take less time and I am less susceptible to writer’s block, yay.
5 seconds to hook you to the game, 5 minutes to prove we are the game for you, and 5 months… left to release the game!