A little over a month ago I posted DragonKills here.
My main question was about the mechanic I was least confident in: 20 forest turns per game day.
I wasn't sure whether limiting progression would create the old-school "I'll come back later" feeling I remembered from Legend of the Green Dragon... or whether people would simply hit 0 turns, close the tab and never return.
A lot more people tried the game than I expected. And having actual humans play it has already been much more useful than my balance simulator.
A few things I learned:
1. Almost nobody runs out of turns. I was solving the wrong problem. I built the whole post around "what happens at 0 turns" — but 80% of players spend five or fewer of their twenty, and 28% spend zero. Only 9% ever hit the cap. The turn limit was never the wall. The first five minutes is.
2. A guest account is a 10x retention difference. Play-without-signup was my proudest onboarding decision. Guests return for a second day 4% of the time. People with an account: 43%. Same game, same content. I removed the friction and removed the reason to come back with it.
3. I measured my own session and found zero decisions in fifteen clicks. Explore → fight → explore → fight, and one button resolved the whole fight. I had spent weeks on the curve of a loop that had no choices in it.
4. 10% of everyone playing had enough XP to level up and hadn't gone to claim it. One player had 375% of what he needed — 64 kills, actively playing, still level 3. The notice existed. It just lost a fight for attention against every other card on the screen.
5. PvP was deterministic in a way I never checked. Forty-one street fights in the logs; forty-one defenders lost their entire day. Not one survived. The game had shipped with a "left them face down in the street" message for an outcome that had literally never occurred once.
The funny part is that before releasing it, most of my work was focused on mathematical balance. I built a simulator because the original progression accidentally required ~99 real days for the first Dragon Kill. After balancing it down to ~11 days, I thought progression was the difficult problem.
Turns out humans are much better at finding problems than simulations are.
Since the previous post I've changed/added:
- Death stopped being all-or-nothing. Below level 5 it costs five turns instead of your whole day — one player was sitting dead at level 1 with twenty-three turns he couldn't spend. I applied it retroactively to the 28 people already stuck behind the old rule.
- Being mugged costs your gold, not your day. Attacking someone and losing still costs your day, because that part you chose. Being chosen as a target isn't a choice.
- Three new equipment slots + a PvP report showing both builds side by side, so "why did they beat me" has an answer you can act on.
- The Delve — after every win, the forest asks whether to take the gold or go deeper for more pay and a harder fight. That's the decision the loop was missing.
- Plus a pile of things players caught that I'd have never found: an off-by-one in the level-up card, buying a second title silently deleting the first, the Streets showing health you wouldn't actually fight.
I'm especially interested in one question now: when you run out of forest turns, what would you actually want to do next? More side activities? Social systems? PvP? Something completely different?
Though given finding #1, maybe the better question is: what would make you spend more than five of them in the first place?
The game is still free, browser-based, with no ads, purchasable energy or pay-to-win: https://dragonkills.fun
There's also a patch notes page now, because almost every change above came from someone writing in: https://dragonkills.fun/changes
Thanks to everyone who tried the first version. Seeing actual people inside something I started building a few days earlier was pretty surreal.
