Invaders Crusaders 2 Years In - How effective was our game?

After 2 years, how successful has Invaders Crusaders been? 

2 years ago we released a game in collaboration with the Invasive Species Council of British Columbia (ISCBC). We wanted to review the stats to find out how successful the game was.
 

Gameplay Breakdown

First let’s review the Invader Crusader project. The goal of the project was to have kids learn about different practices that they can use to help stop the spread of invasive species.  The user was presented with different scenarios where they would follow one of ISCBC’s policies and would result in either the invasive species spreading or not.

The game is built on several levels that all take place on a segmented map of BC. At the start the map has some invasive & native species and some have a starting event timer. Players goal is to have at least as many native species as invasive species once all the rounds have run out. Events present players with a situation and two choices, and depending on the players choice a new invasive species will spawn in that region. In each level users also get a set number of remove actions to remove an existing invasive species. On their turn users can either use a remove action or interact with an event. In between their turns the game will advance events one turn towards happening automatically, and invasive species can spread to nearby regions. As the levels advance different species are presented with new events.

What Does The Data Say?

The game has been played a total of over 10,750 times with each user playing for over 30 minutes. So our game has a high degree of retention as young children are playing the game for half an hour. This breaks down to the game being played for an average playtime globally of 7 hours every day. 92% of users are new to the game which was expected as our design was for a singular learning experience.

From looking at achievement data we can see a breakdown of casual users vs completionists in our demographic. From looking at our achievement curve we can see that our hardest achievement is to perfect a hard level.  Beating the tutorial has a 100% completion rate. This is very exciting to see as it shows that our game was approachable for our target audience. We can see that there is a drop of around 40% from the tutorial to the first level.  

This is an expected drop off as not every player will go through all content in a game.  That is partly why we designed the game to open up after the tutorial so players could play any level they want.  Our hardest achievement is to perfect a hard level. Perfecting a level is to win without any invasive species left on the map.  We’re happy to see that roughly 900 players have pushed themselves to go for this difficult challenge.

In Conclusion

Going in we expected the game to be used more often as a learning tool in a class rather than a long form experience, and from these statistics we feel like this project was a great success.