Key Takeaways:
• Identifying and Correcting Difficulty Curves: PlaytestCloud enabled ZeptoLab to uncover and address significant difficulty curve issues in "Om Nom: Run," which were not evident in internal testing.
• Iterative Testing and Improvement: Over six months, ZeptoLab used PlaytestCloud for iterative testing, adjusting the game's obstacle density and balancing challenge with playability, leading to successful game refinement.
• Valuable Player Insights and Success: ZeptoLab's focus on player feedback and experience through PlaytestCloud helped them fine-tune "Om Nom: Run," contributing to its impressive launch success with over 5 million downloads and high player retention.
ZeptoLab is a global game company best known for the hit Cut the Rope series. They have been using PlaytestCloud since 2016 and because of the success of their past playtest findings, PlaytestCloud has become a permanent tool in their arsenal for testing ideas, concepts, and new games.
Building on the success of the Cut the Rope series, ZeptoLab has created multiple spin-off games using the themes and characters of Cut the Rope. They decided to dive into the endless runner genre with Om Nom: Run. In this game, Om Nom, the iconic candy-loving monster from the original series, runs through the streets of colorful Nomville alongside his friends. While running, the player has to avoid crashing into oncoming obstacles by swiping left and right to move between running lanes or by swiping up and down to jump over or slide under obstacles.
The Om Nom: Run development team was led by Project Manager Liudmila Pashina. Liudmila knows the value of playtesting with PlaytestCloud – in her words “PlaytestCloud is cheaper and faster to use than running focus groups”. As Liudmila and her team were in the late stages of development and had an almost completed product, they ran a 15-minute single session playtest with her target audience as a final check.
Throughout the development process, the team was struggling with finding the right game balance. While helpful, company-internal playtests the team conducted previously weren’t able to provide the actual target audience, because the testers were too invested in the game’s success and had biased opinions. To get an unbiased view into the player experience, their playtest with PlaytestCloud provided an easy and swift check of whether their game was ready to go into global launch.
As the playtest videos came in, Liudmila and her team were met with a troublesome surprise: the playtest revealed that the game had a major structural problem with the difficulty curves. Most players were unable to last more than 5 seconds before hitting an obstacle and having to start over. This was despite players being familiar with endless runner games! Thus the team decided to invest more time into updates and test the game as much as they could to improve its design.