Dune: Awakening
Platform: PC Years: 2024–2025
While at The Outsiders, I was approached by the Dune: Awakening team and asked to help them improve the game's first-time user experience and look over some of its early game systems.
I was part of a ~15 person 'Onboarding' team, embedded in a 400+ person project.​ ​Our work resulted in the game exceeding its launch retention targets by over 300%.​​
Objective
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Our 'Onboarding' team's primary goal was to attain at least 2-hour retention during players’ first ever play-sessions.
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This was to be achieved by revamping the New Player Experience (NPE) and the early-game systems:
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Redesigning the NPE, a short ~20 min safe solo-play area, where players are taught all of the game’s fundamentals without fear of death before being thrown into the punishing world of Arrakis where everything is trying to kill them.
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Rearranging (and in some places entirely redesigning) large portions of the Journeys system, which are a “quest”-like early-game system that served as bite-sized introductions to the game’s various areas, game mechanics, features, and narrative/story. Players would be able to play through these at their own pace — providing them with engaging goals and enough gameplay material for potentially months of playtime.
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Context / Problem to solve
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The game initially had a very hands-off tutorialisation, as it was designed around already dedicated survival players. We quickly found several problems for a large portion of our new players, as not everyone was experienced with all of the particular mechanics and expectations that seasoned survival game players will often have from the get-go. We identified several different player types with different reasons for playing (e.g. survival players, MMO players, general “Dune-heads” interested in the franchise/lore, non-gamers that had fallen in love with the recent blockbuster movies, etc) which therefore required more careful tutorialisation of survival-game mechanics in the FTUE.
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Much of my work focussed on trying to achieve a delicate balance between not being too hand-hold-ey for those already well-versed in the genre, while still providing enough guidance for those who weren’t.
Process
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Wireframes, screen flows, extensive Miro boards outlining game features, playtesting, UX feedback notes.
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Going over which features required tutorialisation, when in the game each tutorial prompts were to trigger, and what conditions were to be met if they were to not trigger at all.
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Adding new tutorial prompts where needed, removing unnecessary/redundant ones, editing/updating existing ones.
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Writing new strings, and rewriting existing ones.
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Collaborating with wider UI/UX team, working on other features across the game. Providing input/feedback on several of these.
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The team implemented changes based on recommendations made from user research, playtests and analytics, in collaboration with the analytics team.​
Result
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We had specific retention targets for launch, and we had ideal/stretch goals — we even surpassed those.
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The Onboarding team that I worked on had a specific goal, which was to achieve at least 2 hour retention on players’ first play-sessions. We surpassed this with over 3x.
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(Players were, in fact, having such unexpectedly long play-sessions on game launch, playing 6-7 hours in their first play-sessions, that we even ended up having server issues as a result, which our CEO commented on in a public video.)
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Play-session duration numbers inevitably dropped somewhat after the initial hype, but remained constant after that, on par with other games of the same style.
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Dune: Awakening made it onto several top Steam lists for several weeks after its launch.
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I can’t provide any exact numbers due to NDA, but the recommendations and improvements we made improved several of the game’s retention numbers by several percentage points. Our Data Analytics Director said that several of the KPIs related to the Onboarding team’s work were “higher than any game I’ve seen before.”