AndrewIntroducing Mega Battles
In the past few weeks we’ve been brainstorming ideas on what to develop next and we realized that challenges were not being used to their full potential.
First, we realized from real usage feedback that many people did not understand what challenges were supposed to be. So we renamed them to Battles to help clarify the situation.
The second thing we noticed on our Discord server was that most people who created battles had a hard time getting people to join them. We think that battles are perhaps the most awesome part of the dinosaur game experience, so we wanted to do something to encourage as many people as possible to play in battles.
Before launching the first version of the website, in our private alpha we didn’t have leaderboards, but instead we had dailyweeklymonthlyyearly high scores. Those were displayed in tables on the front page. We ended up scrapping all of that in favor of leaderboards, which are a much better UX. But we always felt that the ability to become the “Player of the daymonthyear“ was an important one, hence the idea of Mega Battles.
As of writing this, it’s been a few days since we launched Mega Battles and the response was awesome. Both time on site and page views went up, but most importantly, people play a lot more! The daily Mega-Battles currently get around 1000 plays. The second most popular Mega Battle is, unsurprisingly, the yearly one, with 500 plays so far.
In addition to adding Mega Battles, we also finally got rid of the wall of text on the front page. We moved all educational resources to our new Learn section and we added sidebars to all pages. This was quite a lot of work, but in the end it was super worth it.
Adding sidebars also allows us to run ads without disrupting the user experience too much. This is important because by monetizing the website we ensure that we will be able to dedicate time and resources to it.
We'll be back soon with our October update :).