SYNOPSIS
Blast your way through an ancient city of temples and ruins in this strategical explosive puzzle game. Use bombs to free the sacred Power Ball, but watch out for the stone idols, moving platforms and chain reaction explosions that could bring everything crashing down in entirely the wrong way!
54 mind-bending levels
6 lush animated backdrops
Three different types of bomb
Moving platforms
Pre-set bombs
Stone Idols
Different Power Ball types
THE SITUATION
Bomba was Games Labs debut mobile game (App Store, Google Play, Facebook). The purpose of the game was to develop skills, production pipelines and technology base for future projects. The purpose of the game was to take a product end to end in Unity to the develop skills, production pipelines and build a technology stack for future projects. During the process, we additionally wanted to gain an understanding of the process involved with deploying to various platforms, test marketing strategies, test monetization strategies and learn how to collect and analyze user data effectively.
GAMEPLAY
The goal of the game is to free the sacred Powerball using bombs and bring it to rest on the platform for 3 seconds. During playtesting, we found the core bomb mechanic was a getting boring over time and limiting the possibility space. With a focus on improving the puzzle elements and level design, different Bomb types and moving platforms were introduced, which added the dimensions of timing and pressure on the player allowing the creation of more engaging puzzles. Even with the addition of the new features the game still felt flat after sustained play.
To improve engagement and increase repeat play, I proposed the idea of introducing an Idol character which the player could not break while freeing the Powerball. The introduction of the idol character changed the game dynamics significantly as players engaged with an antagonist character who added an element of risk to the game and drove players to complete the level to beat the Idol. The introduction of the Idol allowed for more exciting and challenging level design which drove player engagement through creative problem-solving and completion satisfaction.
MONETIZATION
In 2011 the mobile games market was still very young and finding its feet, with this in mind there was a debate within the company on how to approach analytics and monetization. After much debate, a business decision was made by the financial stakeholders that game released as a one-off purchase on both iOS and Android for $10. With such a high entry point, the adoption rate was poor, and questions were asked of the game as the financial stakeholders could not figure out why they were not getting a return on their investment. The stakeholders had little understanding of the marketplace and player expectations. At the time we could not convince them to drop the price or adopt a freemium monetization model, but after much debate, we did manage to get them to agree to a lite version of the game. The lite version of the game received between 50,000 - 100,000 downloads on Google Play and over 500,00 downloads on iOS. The lite version did result in an increase in sales the price point of the game was way too high inhibiting any chance of commercial success.
