How Uplift Games Uses Analytics & Experimentation to Optimize the Adopt Me! Player Experience
Building a standout game requires experimentation, measurement, and iteration. With Roblox’s Analytics and LiveOps platforms, creators can gain deep gameplay and performance insights, test changes, and adapt to the way people play. Today, we’re announcing real-time performance alerts, more granular targeting and segmentation, and automated early warnings that signal creators if experiments are impacting key metrics. These new tools let creators test changes and deploy live updates with confidence. Developer UpliftBradB shares below how Uplift Games, the studio behind Adopt Me!, uses Roblox’s analytics and LiveOps platforms to improve the pet-adoption experience for their players.
Measure and Ship
Keeping different types of players engaged long-term is a delicate balancing act. Data is a powerful tool for understanding how players interact with a game, identifying where issues could arise, and seamlessly tweaking the game to get it just right. We continually update Roblox’s Analytics and Experience Live Ops platforms based on creator feedback and needs. These new tools make the platforms more flexible and powerful across the board.
Analytics
Analytics dashboards help creators identify areas of opportunity or determine where improvements may be needed. For example, strong one-day retention with a steep drop-off in 30-day retention could signal demand for deeper content. Seeing low day-one retention with a core group of consistent, long-term players could signal a poor onboarding flow or steep difficulty curve.
The Analytics platform can also categorize data by player segments to show whether a trend is universal across players or localized to a specific segment. New segment dimensions let creators slice data by in-game activity, engagement level, platform activity, tenure, and platform spend to understand how play patterns differ.
Performance Monitoring
Performance issues can be difficult to pinpoint. Out-of-the-box telemetry metrics like crash rates, memory usage, CPU time, and frame rate by version help creators fix bugs and ensure that their games run well on all types of devices. We’ve also added new error detection, custom rules to organize error reports, and real-time performance alerts to surface critical issues so creators can respond as quickly as possible.
Experiments
Roblox’s Experiments system lets creators run A/B tests to precisely measure the impact of a feature or change. Our latest updates add targeting by segment, more flexible and rapid configuration, and an early harm-detection system that alerts the creator in near real time if playtime, ARPU, or conversion rate dips below a specific threshold. Over the coming year, we’ll add even more options for custom creator-made metrics and segmentation of experiment results.
Configs
Configs allow creators to launch features and update in-game values in real time without a server restart. With this update, we’ve accelerated config propagation and added a “publish as” feature that allows creators to publish from one environment to another (e.g., staging to production). We’ve also added conditional configs, which allow creators to apply different values to personalize the experience for different player segments. For example, creators can modify difficulty values to make a quest or dungeon easier for new players, or remove rewarded ad prompts for players who have spent Robux.
For creators who want to leverage data through third-party tools as part of their workflow, our OpenCloud APIs enable programmatic management of these features. For example, creators can use coding assistants to set up experiments or monitor analytics.
Learn more about using analytics, performance monitoring, experiments, and configs on the Devforum.
Optimizing the Adopt Me! Player Experience
Uplift Games, the studio behind Adopt Me!, a pet-adoption game with 44.4 billion total visits, uses Roblox’s Analytics platform and Experiments to test new features. These tests help them provide a great experience for players with vastly different play styles, from raising and trading pets to role-playing and building homesteads. Developer UpliftBradB shared how the team thinks about building for such a diverse feature set and community.
“Adopt Me! is designed for all ages,” UpliftBradB said. “We want to keep every mechanic understandable, while giving the right level of depth to systems like building and trading that older audiences enjoy.”
The team recently rolled out a revamped trading platform where players can match up to trade pets. “We used analytics and experiments to test our trading hub for a while before rolling out the full experience,” UpliftBradB said. “We tested lots of variables, like server size and matchmaking signals, and watched how players interacted with the system. Were players more engaged? Was the number of trades increasing?”
Testing changes and seeing the results in analytics gave the team confidence that they were moving in the right direction. But some changes had unintended effects. “We built a feature where players could get a special currency by playing with friends, which they could then use to purchase special pets,” UpliftBradB said. “It was meant to incentivize playing together, but players quickly realized they could spam the server with friend requests to get more currency. That in itself may not have been a problem, but we also noticed a huge increase in players spinning up private servers to get away from the spam.”
With analytics, the team could also monitor performance and quickly adapt when they spotted an issue with a new feature introduced during their summer event. They added fish for players to catch as part of the event but quickly saw a problem. “The crash rate and frame rate clued us in that something was going wrong,” UpliftBradB said. “Digging into it, we found that we’d marked the fish as scenery…which was causing the engine to repaint the backdrops a massive amount.” Spotting the issue early helped the team solve it quickly.
Go Forth and Analyze
UpliftBradB’s story is common among creators: Analytics and experimentation take iteration from an educated guess to a data-informed strategy. Roblox’s flexible platform helps make optimization and data-informed decision-making a standard part of every creator’s workflow. Later this year, we plan to extend analytics capabilities into Build, our mobile-first creation tab in the Roblox app. After the integration, creators will be able to monitor performance on the go. We’ll also expand the platform with new features, including custom experiment actions. Interested creators can sign up now for an early access program to try out the newest experimentation features before they’re live on Roblox.
Roblox makes it easy for creators to build, ship, and iterate intelligently, all in one place.
