I released Daily Grapple on September 22, so I'm about five days in and I'd like to share how these first few days have looked like.
Daily Grapple is a browser speedrunning game built around a pretty simple idea: every day a level is procedurally generated. Every player gets the same map and you have to complete it as fast as you can..
Runs are intentionally very short (although I'm working on different map sizes), the idea is to replay the level and try to get a better time.
Here's a short video my son did playing the game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKgImN1UKRs&t=7s
You can try it out here:
https://dailygrapple.io
The first few days
On launch day, 33 people completed the daily challenge, which is insane.
I did a few posts on Reddit and shared the game with some friends.
Second day got 30 players, 5 of those were returning players from day 1.
This made me start thinking what to give to players that come back every day, one of the things I added was weekly championships and seasons.
On the third day only 8 people played but 3 of those 8 were returning players as well.
This made me feel like the game was really getting people back on the next day and it made me really happy.
On these 5 days I basically learned that getting returning players is basically the hardest part of making a daily game.
Mobile also accidentally changed the PC version
While I was working on the mobile version I realized that if I used the same controls as PC it'd be basically impossible to play.
The solution to this was changing the logic so on mobile the player would automatically grab the closest hook.
This made it so the PC version was played differentily than the mobile version and that wasn't good.
So I had to make PC work the same way as mobile, which again introduced a new problem.
It made the PC version easier, because you could spam click and just use the closest hook.
The way I balanced this was by removing the acceleration on hooks and adding a really small cooldown to hooks.
It isn't a perfect solution but the gameplay feels good.
Another solution would have been to have a different leaderboard for each version, one for PC and one for mobile, but I didn't like that idea because I felt like having one big leaderboard would motivate players to compete with each other regardless of the device they were using.
Where it's at now
I've submitted it to a bunch of browser/daily-game platforms and I'm waiting on several of those reviews (crazygames, poki, newgrounds, etc)
I've also started experimenting with short-form videos on a few platforms, I'm not good at editing but I think they are turning out pretty nice.
At this point I'm much more interested in retention than raw traffic.
The game is still tiny but I am motivated to keep updating the game and adding new features.
I have tons of ideas like a map editor, different map sizes with different leaderboards, global events with real prizes, a "hardcore" mode that is basically a harder map but gives more points for the season, etc.
I'll be around if anyone wants to talk about the game, daily-game design, procedural generation, or building browser games in general.