Cannafarm: Mobile farming game
Cannafarm is a live-ops game with 100k+ monthly users, where I shipped core systems and mechanics from early sketches through final polish. I led a tutorial redesign that drove a measurable lift in player retention, alongside improvements to main menus, cultivation screens, and new social and collection features, delivered through detailed UX flows to a 30+ person team.
PROBLEM SPACE
Cannafarm was experiencing a major drop off of players during the FTUI (tutorial) of the game. My primary role within this product was facilitating and designing a new intuitive and interactive tutorial for the game to ensure users would get to the core game experience as soon as possible.
I initially noticed that the FTUI was overly wordy and didn’t actually engage the player enough. A proper FTUI for applications, especially farming ones are allowing the user to experience the core gameplay elements (cultivating, planting, harvesting) while learning about the experience organically. The cultivation gameplay also needed an overhaul. I not only ultimately redesigned the interactive elements of the farm, but also how to engage the player as soon as possible so users would get through the FTUI in a timely manner. Too long in FTUI purgatory = users leave the app or uninstall; this was the main challenge to tackle.
DRAG ‘N DROP CULTIVATION
The main gameplay loop in Cannafarm is farming; choosing seeds, creating structures, planting seeds, cultivating, then eventually harvesting the plants.
I identified that the core gameplay was key to the problem of player drop off. It wasn’t just the fact that the tutorial was like reading a textbook, but the farming gameplay just wasn’t interactive enough. To plant seeds, it required users LEAVING the gameplay screen, towards another screen without being to identify the location in real time where they were planting (have a look at the “OLD INVENTORY” screenshot above.
By having the cultivation window WITHIN the gameplay screen instead of OUTSIDE of it, it allowed the player to plant seeds in real time as opposed to OFF SCREEN.
This new “drag ‘n drop gameplay” totally altered the feel of the game and was the clear solution to make the core loop more fun, engaging and responsive.
This identification of the gameplay problem led to solutions into other areas of the game including: budding, breeding and plating.
This drag ‘n drop gameplay revolutionized the entire play experience and modernized its approach. We almost entirely removed the text heavy aspects of the FTUI and instead led to players understanding the game immediately.
The new core gameplay loop was created:
Users tap a plot of land or a structure
A window interface appears above gameplay to show the available options to approach the desired farming mechanism
Users drag ‘n drop the desired item into the gameplay space
RESULTS AND IMPACT
The interactive and engaging evolution of the gameplay led to a 9-10% increase in Weekly User Retention during my time at the job. This is one of my favorite examples of my work where I identified key problems within a specific environment and how I implimented proven and tested systems that were popular at the time for competing software and transformed a system into something not only fun, but provably engaging.
