Oirbo devlog #70 - Demo analysis - Into big data xD


Hi everyone,

The new demo is out for the last couple of weeks so we decided as promised to do a full post exploring the data we collect as you play (anonymously of course).

This data is super important for an upcoming game like Oirbo, even with our community helping us out and giving us a constant stream of feedback, the majority of our players are silent and will never reach out to us complaining if a section is too hard or unfair, gathering this data helps us balance the overall game difficulty and get insights on how the game is being played and where the major pitfalls of the game are. 

Without further ado, let's look at the warehouse area deaths heat map:

In the "heat map" above all the player kills from the last 2 weeks are displayed, the first thing we can see is that they are focused on the hardest parts of the area, which is something that we expected, the only major concern that we have is the bottom section, where it should still be a tutorial section but people are dying too much on it, so for the next update we will make a difficulty review on the sections and try to nerf it a little bit. The rest of the "blobs" are exactly where we expected them to be, so a review will be done but just to ensure that no unfair stuff is going on xD.

For the Nature area we have:

In the nature area nothing really pops up, that shouldn't be expected, as an example, the lower section (the dark tank) has a lot of deaths, but this is to be expected since this section won't be available right away since you will have to collect the dark vision skill, that we offered for free on the demo xD. The rest of the sections where the player died the most were on the optional hard challenges that we set in the area which will give major advantages if successfully completed. The biggest worry for this area is the initial section on the border with the warehouse area, where too many players died in order to reach the central hub (where the big tree is xD) since all of these are mechanics introduction sections we might need to tone them down a bit.

Now another interesting point to see in conjunction with the deaths heat map is where the players actually got hurt:

Can you detect the safe spots on the Warehouse area xD? This one just confirms that our bottom platforming section is probably too harsh for beginning players, and we really need to nerf it a little down. In the rest of the sections again nothing really pops out now, but we will see how it will evolve.

On

On the nature area in another hand, it's more of the same, the intro sections are probably too hard right now and we need to tone them down a little, the rest is surprisingly "fine".

Another point of interest is to know what enemies and where are being killed by the players, this ensures us that the puzzles that we set up that require the player to kill an enemy are actually working and the player is progressing as intended. Lets look at the warehouse area map:

This one is actually a bit surprising, the big blogs are in the place we expected, but there are a few places where there aren't one that should be impossible, so a big note to self and anyone using data to develop, remember that there is always data that doesn't come through, in our case 2 major sections that we know players were there but we don't have any kill data points XDD.

On the nature area, we have the exact same results, where entire sections that should have kills don't xD

Now for random stats cool stats:

  • It took on average 12 minutes to reach the Warehouse boss (only 52 reached that far)
  • It took on average 40 minutes to reach the Nature area boss (only 10 reached that far)
  • On average a player stood alive for 2.42 minutes (the issue with the initial sections appearing everywhere xD)
  • On average a player walked 710 meters (Oirbo is 1 meter tall)
  • Players died 3421 times
  • Got hurt 23872 times
  • Killed 7534 enemies
  • 1 gamer finished the demo in 15 minutes!!!!
  • 2 gamers finished the demo 2 times (the game automatically deletes the save file when the demo is completed)

Now with data in hands, we will make a bunch of changes to the beginning of both Warehouse and Nature areas mainly nerf it or reduce the number of challenges so that they don't become such road blocks to players, with the data we also found out that every hidden section and item that we have got collected at least once, and that the whole map was explored, now its time to take all this info and improve the game with it!

The usual big thanks to all our patrons for continuing to support us even on this downtime, and other thanks to all Oirbo fans that keep sending us feedback! Don't forget to join us on Discord, Twitter, and wishlist the Oirbo on  Steam.

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