Soft-Launched Football Game

Project Context

I was brought onto this football project to work alongside its pioneering creator, delivering design work at regular milestones.

The project was unfortunately cancelled due to the game not meeting the required metrics during the soft launch period.

Detailed Contribution

Core Gameplay Features & Content Planning

• Handling player status' as it relates to real-world rules and behaviours. This includes probabilities related to injuries, effects of high fatigue, a morale system, and yellow and red card rulings

• Additional camera options to reflect the different perspectives offered in competitor football titles

• Career Mode rework to reflect the vast play options (play match, sim, watch match) transfer options (transfer list players, bid arrived, counter bids, approach player to loan etc.) move clubs (as manager) end-season logic (teams move up and down divisions, out-of-contract players moved to transfer list, objectives met/not met logic) and other real-world activities

• Customisable competitions including bespoke rules for each round (where possible) 

• World competitions including synergy with a new trophy system, awarding users with star ratings based on the difficulty on winning a given trophy with a high/low rated team, and synergy with career mode in unlocking a player in career mode relating to the competition (e.g being granted a highly rated British player by completing an English League tournament with a low-rated team)

• Edit mode with customizable player (name and abbreviation), team (name and abbreviation) and badge edits

• Accessibility and colourblind design, guided by documentation provided by Netflix Games. This includes changes to colours (fonts, kits, grass, pitch markings, player stamina rings and player selection rings) and UI (sizing and shapes) to ensure our game is as accessible and colourblind-friendly as possible

FTUE & Onboarding

• 3 dedicated FTUE & onboarding experiences based on the controller input, player behaviours and level of information needed to communicate for PC, mobile and console audiences. Specific considerations include the option to 'skip all' on PC and console, but restrict mobile users to play a small portion to understand the most basic input systems (which are somewhat unintuitive on mobile).

UX Design

• Full menu mockups and wireframed user flow for menu screens, button shortcuts and difficulty quick-select

• Pre-match starting line-up, subs bench and formation display akin to a Sky Sports line-up graphic 

• Mobile settings UX including settings content (UI toggles, control remapping, sider options) and settings user flow

• Live-ops design planning and implementation including bi-weekly objectives and XP rewards on rotation. This included CMS interface design, allowing internal and external users to deliver a pipeline of live-ops challenges directly into the game. I provided a visual flow that allowed for scheduling content drop dates, challenge lookup, assigning challenges to specific teams, and defining the variables of the challenge, including whether or not the challenge is tied to individual players (or the entire team) and times needed to perform to complete the challenge

Project Outcomes

Development had grown from roughly 10 developers to over 30 individuals across the country as I gained valuable development skills working with both internal and external teams.

Working directly with an esteemed game designer allowed me to grow my skills in sports game design, with a focus on gameplay, whilst working on objectives that fulfilled the corporate-level goals of a game catered for an African-first audience.

Metrics

We did not meet our Day 1 metric goals during our first soft launch milestone (Tech Test.) Analytics showed the following findings: 

• We were tracking just under 9% for D1 retention, with retention decay accelerated at D2 (3.83%) and totally churned by D7 (1%.) This suggests a technical hurdle or FTUE friction on D1 and an unsticky game (due to a lack of re-engagement triggers.) Sensible industry benchmarks for a mobile sports game would be at around 30% D1 retention, sitting at about 10% by D7

• Below-average session times of 3 minutes, combined with just over 5 minutes of total playtime, suggest we're getting about 1.6 sessions per user. This tracks significantly lower than the mobile sports game benchmark, in which would be closer to 6-8 minute sessions for about 20-30 minutes of total playtime, with a daily session frequency of 4+

Lessons Learned Going Forward

There were, unfortunately, a number of decisions made at a corporate level that impacted the project. One of which included the pivot to serve an African-first audience, catering to the target market of our parent company. This proved to be a technical blow to the project as, despite significant optimisation, asking a WiFi-less, data-first audience from developing countries to pay for a game with a download size of over 1GB was a tall order. This market simply desires lightweight titles to avoid high data costs. If this decision was not made on a corporate level, I would have insisted on deprioritising a market we know does not have access to high-speed WiFi, nor is a monetizable market.

Supplementing this was our heavy, multi-step FTUE, demanding over 10 minutes of play, of which I had not advocated for. Through skippable, metrics showed that by the time users even see the skip button, they've spent over 5 minutes downloading the game and progressing through various introductory texts and animations. Going forward, I would have insisted on an instantly-appearing Skip button before all animation and Introductory text appears, given our African target market is playing on low spec devices; watching slow animations and slow text appearing before the option to skip caused significant churn.

As an avid gamer and game designer, I also knew our focus on content instead of ensuring the core match experience was as tight as possible would be our undoing, outside of technical concerns. This included prioritising live ops content, career mode, offline tournaments and other modes and features instead of the match experience (Friendlies) that would be the only mode available during early tests. For the small cohort that did progress through, or past, the FTUE, they were simply not paying more than 2 matches. This told us the core match experience was not of a high enough level to retain and engage players.