When Story Cards Get in Each Other's Way
More players signed in to the cloud save, but fewer agreed to usage statistics. The cause was a hidden chain of dependencies between story cards, cooldowns and bonus events. Today's fixes, a new measurement and two story cards that hint at a bigger world.
Over the last weeks the game has gained a lot of story cards: the crystal find, the cloud save, project teasers, investments, region milestones. Each one is a small moment with a picture and a few lines of text. To keep these moments from piling up, bonus events (the lost VIP pass, the ski fair, the mountain rescue) wait 30 minutes of play after every important card.
Each rule made sense on its own. Together they produced a side effect I didn't see coming.
More cloud sign-ins, fewer analytics answers
Since the cloud save got its own story card, far more players sign in with Google. At the same time, the number of players who answer the usage statistics question dropped sharply.
The reason was one line in the conditions. The statistics question only came after the first bonus event, so that players had seen a bit more of the game before being asked. But the first bonus event can be pushed back by every story card, and the cloud card itself is one of them. A player could sign in, play several sessions and never see a bonus event, and therefore never see the question.
The fix is simple: the statistics question no longer waits for a bonus event. It comes once the first region's Wintersportzentrum is open, after the cloud card, when nothing else is on screen. Both answers are still equally easy, and neither one changes anything in the game.
Measuring before tuning
The obvious next thought was "bonus events are too rare, let's shorten the cooldown". But I don't actually know that yet. So the intervals and cooldowns stay as they are for now, and the game measures instead:
- how many events are scheduled, how many actually happen and how many are shown and collected
- how long a due event waits before it appears
- what held it back, second by second: the 30-minute story cooldown, the 5-minute cooldown after an offline report, another dialog on screen, a story moment that goes first, or simply that the game was closed
Every shown event records its main cause. The numbers end up in two places: in the cloud saves of signed-in players and, for players who agreed, as analytics events. My progress script now prints a "Bonus events" section next to the region progress. It also lists the players who could have received events but never got a single one. That group is the most interesting one.
A bigger world, without spoilers
Two new story cards have no reward at all, just a picture, a few lines and "Got it". Their only job is to make the world feel bigger before it actually opens.
Attention from North America comes when the third expansion of Monte Fiocco starts. By then the player knows Italy, and France is already visible as a locked tab. A North American winter sports magazine writes about the resort for the first time. The card doesn't name Canada, and it disappears for good once the first North American region is unlocked, because by then it would no longer be a teaser.
Interest from North America comes halfway through the Winterfest. Freestyle athletes and organisers are watching the resort, and maybe the next big challenge is waiting. That challenge, a freestyle festival, doesn't exist in the game yet. The card should make the player think "something bigger comes after this", not "a new project is unlocked". That's why its picture shows a planning team on a lodge terrace and a snow groomer shaping the first jump, not a finished event.
Both cards started out with four sentences. On a phone that was too much, so they now have two and three. A story card that people read beats one they skip.
Technically both use a new, small system: a list of teasers, each tied to the start of a build in a region or a project. The next one is just another entry in a config file, plus its texts and a picture.
A quiet hint for Android players
Some players play the browser version on an Android phone. The settings now show them one small line under the cloud save: they can play the same save in the Android app, with a link to Google Play. The first draft was a card of its own with a heading and an Android icon. It felt like an ad, so it shrank to a muted line and a text link. It never appears anywhere else, and never on a desktop or an iPhone.
Next
The new measurement needs a few days of real players. Then the data will show whether bonus events have really become too rare, and how much of that is caused by the story cooldown.