My new daily reward paid 6.8x more if you skipped days

A couple of weeks back I posted here asking what the next big mechanic should be. Then the analytics came in and I built something much less exciting instead.

The loop is fine. Everyone who gets deep enough to prestige does it. 29 out of 29. Then they go and do it about ten more times. The problem is that they don't come back the next day. Daily players over monthly players was sitting at about 2.5%.

So, a daily bonus. Thirty days, Gold every day, Geodes on twelve of them, the big ones on 7, 14, 21 and 30.

The thing I didn't want was a streak that punishes you for having a life. This game's whole pitch is that you can ignore it for a week. So a missed day inside any given week gets forgiven on its own, a longer gap drops you back to the last milestone you hit instead of zeroing you out, and you get one free restore.

Which is how I ended up building the exact opposite.

Break your streak, and you land back on your last milestone. Then the game pays you for the day you landed on. Milestones are the big payouts. So once you'd reached day 30, the best thing you could do was break your streak on purpose every third day, land on 30 again, and collect day 30 over and over.

I found it because I gave up reading the code and simulated it instead. Sixty days, two players. One of them logs in every single day and finishes with 74 Geodes. The other one skips two days out of every three and finishes with 500.

It didn't ship. It did pass its tests, which is the part I keep thinking about. There was a test for that exact case. It checked that breaking on a milestone day cost you zero days of progress. It never checked what the claim actually paid.

So a break pays nothing now. You come back, you pick up from the milestone, and the money starts again the next day.

That is worse for some of you and I'd rather say it than have you find out. If you genuinely play every third day, this feature now gives you nothing. The grace day covers a missed day, not a schedule. If it turns out a lot of people play that way I'll put a small payout back on the break itself, but I want to see that in the numbers before I guess at it.

Then I put the build on my phone and couldn't claim the bonus.

The day tile was lit up amber, biggest brightest thing on the screen, and it wasn't a button. The real claim button was sitting underneath it and I'd given it black text on a dark grey background. 1.2 to 1. I had a hundred and thirty-odd assertions on this feature at that point and not one of them pressed anything, so none of them were ever going to catch either one of those.

1.6.0 goes out this week. Free, no in-app purchases, nothing to buy. There are three ads in the whole game and you have to go and tap them on purpose.