Here's an interesting snippet from an article in last month's App Developer Magazine. --- A global study by CA Technologies measured the major factors impacting consumer loyalty and usage of mobile apps. The study surveyed 6,770 consumers and 809 business decision-makers in 18 countries. The leading factor impacting loyalty was app loading time: 68% of consumers have left an app because of poor loading times. On top of that, users indicated that they expect an app to load in four seconds or less. More than half of those respondents demanded a load time of less than three seconds. If an app fails to load within that time, consumers are likely to abandon the app altogether. A recently released Mobile Game Performance Index measures the time-to-play of leading mobile games, i.e. the time it takes for popular mobile games to complete downloading before the game starts playing. The index measured the total content size and download speed in seconds. Games that ranked high exhibited a faster content download speed and are most likely utilizing advanced mobile acceleration technology. Surprisingly, some leading titles, including Gardenscrapers, Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes and Raid HQ, failed to download within the four second load time expected by most players. The majority of mobile gamers play less than an hour every month. This underlines the necessity to provide a fun and satisfying experience that will motivate them to spend their monthly hour in your game. Gamers expect a fast, dynamic, gratifying experience with immediate rewards. In most cases, developers only get one shot to impress players. If a game keeps them waiting or frustrates them, they’ll leave and may never come back. Give players a good experience and they may become your most active users. Give them an excellent experience and they may join those avid gamers that spend ten hours a week on your game. Players leave games, and may leave them way too fast. On average, less than 40% of players return to a free-to-play game after just one session. Of course, for users to return to your game, they need to enjoy their first session. Users that are turned off from the get-go may never give a game a second chance. Retention is arguably the most important metric in a free-to-play game. If players leave a game too fast and too often, the game has failed, particularly if you are monetizing your game with in-app purchases. The same rule applies if you’re monetizing an app with advertising: latency and connection failure during ad display equals lost ad revenue. Mobile games are all about speed and user experience. Optimized performance is expected and assumed by all players, regardless of age and level of gaming experience. Compromised user experience leads to frustration, abandonment and even the uninstalling of mobile games. Optimized performance means an enhanced gamer engagement, higher retention and increased in-app revenue. Do you know how your mobile game performs? ---
My upcoming game needs 8 seconds loading time on a iPhone SE. Definitely too much. I always said so. It's frustrating to say the least. How long needs your game to load?
Great article @AndyG thanks for sharing it.. @Andy are there any official Buildbox recommended best practices for keeping the loading times low? I mean, apart from the obvious things like having optimized sprites and low amount of atlasses, is there anything else that we can do to make our games load as soon as possible? Thanks!
TreySmith recommended in his video "The Making of The Line Zen", to have little physics in the objects, few lights, to have few objects in the screen and the objects with few collision shape. I recommend you also do not re-scale images inside BB, and use low-medium quality music, along with a maximum of 2 Atlasses.
many thanks @jcalle those are definitely useful for the optimization of the gameplay, but my question was more related to the loading of the game (as in when you first install the game and open it on the device) - the mentioned article says "68% of consumers have left an app because of poor loading times" so I am wondering what can we do to reduce those loading times apart from what we are already doing. I read some time ago @Christoph 's reply on this thread: https://www.buildbox.com/forum/index.php?threads/1000-levels-and-100-world-10-themes.5508/page-2 there, he says the following: "But when loading the game on a device you see, that at 25-30% the connections are loaded. This has nothing to do with the atlases used. Does a setup like that not stay there forever loading all these connections?" So maybe, the amount of connections we use in a project affect the loading time of the game on a device, maybe the amount of worlds and UIs we use also affect the loading time. Maybe there is something else we can do to improve the loading times of BB games.
Small optimisations do help, and the more stuff you have will slow it down, but there is a trick that I was recommended once, and that's to have your Splash screen look very similar to your first Menu, so it appears the game loads quicker than it actually does. You can also animate text in another UI, then copy and paste it into the Start Screen in BB so it looks as though it's not just a boring static image and the user doesn't think it's loading.
I like the idea of this. Good stuff @AaroArts Identical start screen to the upcoming Menu screen but maybe with the, to be revealed, Play button saying something like Loading then when the game does load it of course "switches" to the actual Play button Also good idea having a start screen perhaps with an animation and humorous text: aka Cogs whirling... Brain connecting... etc., and whilst this is "entertaining" the gamer its loading in the background and then finally the game play screen is displayed. I'm sure though @NikRudenko has marvellous things for loading speed in hand for v3
Can you have animated text on the splash screen? Does that work? I thought it shows only the PNG that Buildbox exports and no animations are possible...
For loading speed... start testing/using 2.3 BETA. Yes, really. It's going to help WAAAY more than anything else, BETA2 will be out soon. However, for now, I still suggest developing in 2.2.9 and then exporting with 2.3 BETA. Once 2.3 official release is out you can move development to 2.3 without much risk.
Cool stuff! The topic is misleading, isn't it? I thought the gameplay should be fast but this is all about loading time, right?
Check out Sky Castle. I accidentally discovered it when I pasted the Label from my Main menu into my Splash Screen to adjust the text. Technically BBs Splash Screen isn't a Splash Screen, it's a UI with less functionality. XCode Splash Screens are however are just PNGs. So it'll show just the background colour from BB or anything that is seen in the first frame of the Start Screen in BB if that makes sense. That's how they can display a loading bar/counter. Try it Should work unless they've removed it from recent versions.
