Finding the Game, and Finding My Role
I didn’t start off in game design, but instead in community management, and heck I kind of stumbled into that. I found the game Clicker Heroes when the subreddit only had 20 users. I became one of the volunteer community moderators and watched the community grow from those initial 20 users all the way to over 40,000 where it is today.
As a member of the community, I didn’t have control over the direction of the game and that restriction made me more aware of some of the game’s shortcomings. People kept asking the same questions, so I helped build tools like a detailed FAQ and a Discord bot to answer them automatically.
The Problem With Repeated Questions
Initially I thought having these questions was good for the game. It created a need for community and it brought players together to discuss strategy. However, what I didn’t realize is that this creates a bit of a survivorship bias. There are players who will seek out information, ones who play without it, and then the ones who leave out of frustration because the game doesn’t provide it.
So if you’re facing the same issue, what do you do? Do you make your game dead simple and have tutorials for everything and limit the strategies? No, of course not, but it’s definitely a balance. You don’t want your game to be too simple that there is no strategy to discuss, but you also don’t want repeat questions about basic mechanics. Getting better at recognizing what are recurring strategy questions vs. basic mechanic functionality questions is important. The more basic mechanic functionality questions you can answer in game, the more thinking you can free up for strategy, the more strategy you can add, the bigger the need is for community and discussion.
In my experience, when you have these repeated questions especially from new players who join your community, you end up with toxicity/frustration from the existing player base that lead to RTFM interactions which make it less likely for new members to stick around. You can try to discourage this behavior from the community, but that’s difficult. You can create tools like an FAQ or automoderator, but those also have their limitations and are less personal than what someone wants who is joining a community to discuss a game.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t still have a FAQ and/or Discord bots, but you should understand their limitations and make fixes within your game when necessary. There are many different levers you can pull and not one of them is the only answer.
Turning Engagement Into Incentives
Once you've reduced that early friction, by cleaning up confusing mechanics and making key systems more intuitive, it becomes easier to keep new players around. The next challenge becomes not just retaining them, but giving them a reason to engage more deeply. That’s where community comes in, it helps to create strong bonds and adds another way to reduce churn in your game. The reality of the world today is that people yearn for community and if you can provide that for them, you are more likely to have loyal fans and stickiness with your game.
So how do you create more community engagement? One powerful way is to give players room for creativity. Strategy is one form of creativity since it lets players choose how they progress, and that sparks discussion around optimization and tactics. But even if your game isn’t strategy heavy, you can still create discussion by giving players ways to express themselves. This could mean creating unique player experiences, enabling customization, or even running art contests that give the community a creative outlet to share with others.
Art Contests and Coupon Codes
I was still just a community moderator when I ran the first art contest for Clicker Heroes, but thankfully, the development team had already created a system that they could use to generate premium currency coupons and hand them out for players to redeem. During art contests, I had the community vote on the art and I provided coupon codes to the winners.
These coupon codes also served another purpose: encouraging specific player actions. For example, in game we said, “Join us on Discord for updates and occasional ticket redemption codes,” and used similar messaging for email sign ups.
If you’re designing a system like this, think about how you might use codes to guide player behavior. They can help improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, streamline support responses, and boost overall player satisfaction.
Wearing Every Hat
Eventually, Playsaurus hired me as a Community Manager, but we were a scrappy company, so from day one I was effectively Support Staff, QA Tester, Junior Developer, Product Owner, Game Designer, and Project Manager. None of these roles were full-time in isolation, but wearing all of those hats gave me a 360 degree view of the player experience and showed me where improvements could be made from different angles.
While Clicker Heroes was mostly in maintenance mode by the time I joined, I was able to contribute to other projects at Playsaurus including Clicker Heroes 2. That project taught me a lot, especially about the difference between what players say they want and how they actually play. It wasn’t as well received as the original, and while I wasn’t deeply involved in all design decisions, the experience gave me a better understanding of how community expectations and internal vision can diverge. Those lessons directly shaped how I approached Mr. Mine, where I wasn’t just a community manager, but also a developer and game designer.
Bringing It All to Mr. Mine
For Mr. Mine, Discord was the primary tool for community engagement and I made sure to apply some of what I had gathered over the years on this game. Mr. Mine ended up being our second most successful game after Clicker Heroes. One of the ways I increased community engagement was to allow players to send their save to our Discord bot and then automatically grant them roles in the server based on their in game progress. This created a somewhat competitive aspect to an otherwise single player game, it gave players something to strive for and something to show off to other members in the community.
I kept an eye out for recurring questions in Mr. Mine and pushed for quick updates based on community input. That responsiveness was, in my opinion, a major factor in the game’s success. Players could also suggest changes or features through a dedicated Discord channel, where each message had to begin with “Idea:”. A bot reacted to every message with thumbs up and thumbs down emojis so the community could vote on suggestions. Periodically, the bot used AI to group similar ideas and generate an aggregate score. These suggestions directly informed our design priorities.
Here’s an example of how these suggestions would be combined
{
suggestion: “You should be able to collect chests while offline”
upvotes: 10,
downvotes: 2
},
{
suggestion: “Chests should be collected during offline progress”
upvotes: 5,
downvotes: 1
},
Those suggestions would turn into
{
suggestion: “Add a way to collect chests while offline”
upvotes: 15,
downvotes: 3
}
How Players Say One Thing and Mean Another
When utilizing player feedback, one must understand that players rarely mean what they say. They usually don’t go into enough detail or design new features for you so you usually need to read between the lines a bit. For example, if they suggest the game is “too slow” that usually doesn’t mean you should speed the game up. It could mean adding a new mechanic that keeps the player entertained. Similarly, and maybe somewhat more intuitive, when a user says “This feature is too complex” that doesn’t necessarily mean to make it simpler, it may just mean you need to slowly introduce the complexity and add better tutorials or UI/UX. If you find yourself in a similar situation, an important lesson I learned was to not take what they say so literally! Especially if it seems negative, try to look at it from a different perspective and see what you can do. Negative feedback can be hard to hear, but ignoring it is almost always a bigger mistake.
The Players You Never Hear From
Remember that the players who make it into your community are the minority. You can optimize how you get players into your community, but you’ll never get them all. The ones who don’t make it are the silent majority. Even if players don’t speak up, I’ve found there are still ways to gather feedback. For example, Mr. Mine had in game surveys where we could gather feedback even from players that didn’t make it into our community. The questions were more targeted and helped to validate design decisions, identify pain points we hadn’t anticipated, and in some cases gave us wording or language that made its way directly into the game.
Listening is Good. Watching is Better.
While qualitative feedback is powerful, it’s only half the picture. You’ll also want to collect quantitative data by monitoring in game events, tracking feature usage, and running A/B tests to see how small tweaks impact retention or monetization. For us it sometimes would confirm what players were saying. Other times, it showed us what they were not saying, but were still struggling with and it drove us to create a better game overall.
For example our shop had 2 tabs in it one for purchasing the premium currency and one for the items you purchased with the premium currency. Initially we had the first tab as the one listing the premium currency instead of the items. We decided to run an A/B test to switch it so that the items showed up first instead. This led to a significant increase in purchases. Most likely because players want to know what they can buy with the currency before deciding to make a purchase.
I’ll be going deeper into this in a future post about tracking user events and A/B testing in game design, but the short version is: Listening is great. Watching is better. Do both.