Design Doodles | Patreon Weekly #64 (Patreon)

Hey Patrons!

In the spirit of releasing more frequent updates, I've decided to release one more patch for v0.8.2 with a bunch of smaller fixes from my list, rather than rolling those into v0.9.0.

What Exactly is ‘The List’?

If you’ve ever reported a bug or other issue to me, you might have heard me refer to a list of things that I plan to look into. This list is part of a large group of text documents that I use to loosely organize my thoughts when developing Shattered. These texts rarely reach the size/detail of full design documents, so ‘design doodles’ might be a more fitting term for them.

Previously Shattered’s doodles were all contained within a book in OneNote, but I’ve been slowly moving away from that lately. It was annoying to have a separate program to keep notes, and OneNote’s support for nested notes is lacking, which means that over time things became a total mess.

Android Studio provides functionality for ‘scratch files’, which are text documents that are attached to your project, but aren’t part of the code. I’ve been steadily transitioning to these instead, as they let me organize notes better and view them in the same program that I code in:

That ‘Patch Fixes’ file is the new home of my list of things to look into and potentially, well, patch. the ‘0.8.2c’ file has a list of all the changes I’m going to try to address in 0.8.2c. Lastly, if you’re curious what that ASO file stands for, its where I’m doing record keeping for…

App Store Optimization

So a little while ago I talked about Shattered getting more attention on Google Play. That’s uh... still happening:

Because Google Play is actually recommending Shattered to people now, suddenly the quality of the store listing can make a big difference in terms of how many users play and stick with the game. I’ve been working on a few things in that regard:

Firstly, I’m making the store listing and app screenshots available in multiple languages! Having a manual instead of automatic translation on the store listing makes a BIG difference both in terms of how much the game is featured to users who speak that language, and how likely they are to download it.

I’m also making incremental improvements to the primary store listing in English via A/B testing. Currently I’m running a test on the game’s short summary description. The top entry is the current listing, and the bars are a 90% confidence interval on the performance of each variant. It’s too early to call it yet, but it looks like the emoji variant isn’t doing so hot:

Lastly, as there’ll hopefully be more eyeballs on the Patreon thanks to the ingame news feed, I’m looking to improve some of the writing here as well! Right now I’ve made the rewards for each tier more concise, and am improving the title format for these posts. I also have some plans to improve the main description and the icons for each tier this week.