I supported Darkness Rises by helping the team understand where players were succeeding, struggling, or leaving. Because combat, progression, and the game economy affected one another, a problem that appeared in one place often started somewhere else.

I built internal dashboards that brought progression, completion rates, win rates, retention, and spending into one view. Instead of seeing only that players had dropped off, the team could look at what happened in the levels and decisions leading up to that point.

The dashboards became part of regular product and design reviews. That made the data useful in the room where decisions were made: we could identify a specific problem, agree on a gameplay or economy change, and then check whether it helped.

The team had overall performance numbers, but those numbers did not explain why a player stopped. A retention drop might have started with a difficulty spike, an unclear upgrade requirement, or a shortage of resources several levels earlier.

The harder part was making the analysis useful to designers. The dashboards had to follow the player’s journey and show enough detail to support a real change, not just report that a metric had moved.

At first, we relied too much on overall metrics and one-off reports. They could tell us that retention or spending had changed, but they rarely pointed to the exact moment that needed work. Broad fixes followed, and it was difficult to know which part of the change had helped.

Individual player stories were useful but could also pull attention toward unusual cases. We added repeatable views of player groups and progression steps so those stories could be checked against what the wider audience was doing.

The dashboards made it faster to move from a product question to a decision. Gameplay and economy teams had a clearer way to choose what to address first and could see whether a change improved the part of the experience it was meant to fix.

Darkness Rises went on to reach 23 million players worldwide and rank among the top-grossing RPGs on the Apple App Store and Google Play. My contribution was one part of that larger effort: helping the team make better-informed decisions as the game grew.