Improving Player Retention And Daily Engagement

Designing Daily and Weekly Engagement Systems

Mobile game retention depends heavily on creating compelling reasons for players to return daily. The goal: establish a feedback loop where players log in, complete manageable objectives, watch some ads, and feel rewarded—all within approximately 20 minutes.

This post covers the systems I implemented to achieve that: daily quests, daily challenge levels, weekly competitive levels, and significant changes to community level creation.

Quest System Overview

The quest system includes both daily and weekly objectives. Daily quests can be completed in a single session. Weekly quests require sustained engagement—they need 100 points to complete, with individual quests awarding 10 points each, meaning completion takes at least five days of play.

Both quest types reward players with chests containing progression resources.

Daily Challenge Levels

Daily challenges use existing levels from the regular level pool but layer up to three challenge modifiers on top. There are approximately 10-11 challenge types, and three rotate in daily.

Before starting a daily challenge level, players can opt into activating any combination of the available challenges. Each modifier adds difficulty, some examples include:

• Restricting access to "long" upgrade variants
• Removing the trajectory prediction line
• Disabling cannon tilt (rotation adjustment)
• Disabling cannon vertical repositioning

The risk-reward structure is straightforward:

• Base reward (no challenges): Three chests, 50 gems each = 150 gems total
• Per challenge activated: +25 gems per chest
• All three challenges: Three chests at 125 gems each = 375 gems total

A single chest with all challenges activated yields nearly the same reward as all three chests with no challenges. This heavily incentivizes players to push themselves.

Additionally, a daily quest requires attempting the daily challenge at least once, creating natural progression overlap.

No leaderboard for daily challenges. Since players can activate different challenge combinations, times aren't comparable across the player base. Rankings would be meaningless, so I disabled them for this mode.

Weekly Competitive Levels

Weekly levels serve a different purpose: community-wide competition for the fastest completion times.

Attempt structure: Players get one attempt per day, up to seven attempts over the week to improve their time.

Level selection: Weekly levels may be specially designed for competition, drawn from regular levels, or pulled from challenge levels. The flexibility allows for fine-tuning difficulty and creating opportunities for creative problem-solving.

Progression incentive: Component upgrades (portals, speed tracks, etc.) directly affect completion times. Players who invest in upgrades gain competitive advantages, creating a connection between progression systems and leaderboard performance.

Rewards:

• One-time completion reward (collectible once per week)
• Tiered ranking rewards—top positions receive substantial gems and generic shards; lower ranks receive smaller rewards; even positions beyond 10,000 receive participation rewards

Social visibility: The top 20 leaderboard displays player names and profile pictures. Profile pictures can be set to any unlocked ball, creating visible status indicators. When a player sees someone ranked highly with a rare ball as their profile image, it creates aspirational motivation.

Community Level System Overhaul

The original community level system charged energy for editing, publishing, and duplicating levels. The intent was to limit API calls and associated costs. The effect was making level creation feel punishing.

I wanted community levels to be accessible regardless of energy state. A player who has exhausted their energy playing regular levels should still be able to experiment in the sandbox, create levels, and engage with the community.

Key changes:

1. Local draft storage: Drafts are now stored exclusively on the device. Every component placement writes immediately to local storage—no manual saving required, no risk of lost progress. This also eliminates DynamoDB costs for draft storage.

2. Free publishing: Players can publish levels without spending energy.

3. Playing costs energy: Playing other players' community levels still requires energy and awards rewards for completion.

Exploit Mitigation

Free level creation introduces exploit vectors. I systematically addressed each one:

Self-play exploit: What if players create trivial levels and play them repeatedly for rewards?

• Mitigation: Players can play their own levels (for testing), and it costs no energy, but they receive no rewards.

Friend farming exploit: Two players create easy levels for each other and grind rewards.

• Mitigation: Energy cost per play limits daily reward extraction. More significantly, I changed the reward structure.

Coin farming exploit: The old system awarded coins collected during gameplay. A level with five coins leading directly to the goal would allow players to farm coins for gacha pulls.

• Mitigation: Coins are now exclusively in-game currency required for star collection (level completion). They cannot be spent on the gacha system. Instead, gold bars (required for gacha pulls) come from completion chests. A community level completion awards a fixed two gold bars regardless of in-level coin placement. With gacha pulls requiring 100-150 gold bars, the farming rate is too slow to be worthwhile.

Accepting Residual Risk

Some exploitation remains technically possible. Players could still coordinate easy levels with friends for incremental gold bar farming. However:

• The reward rate is minimal (2 gold bars per level)
• Players engaged enough to coordinate this are also watching daily ads (5 ads for 100 gems), upgrading components, and generally engaging with monetization
• The trade-off—free level creation encouraging broader engagement—is worth the minor exploit potential

Restricting creation to prevent edge-case exploitation would harm the majority of legitimate players. I chose to optimize for engagement over perfect exploit prevention.

Summary

These systems work together to give players daily reasons to return:

• Daily quests: Short-term objectives with immediate rewards
• Daily challenges: Scalable difficulty with proportional rewards
• Weekly levels: Competitive goals with social visibility
• Community levels: Creative sandbox accessible regardless of energy state

The energy system gates core progression while leaving creative and social features accessible. Players always have something meaningful to do.