Miny had brain surgery

Make the game too easy and players will complain. Make the game too tough and players will complain. It's hard to calibrate the difficulty of Android games because you have such a large audience. You can't tell whether your game will be played by a hardcore gamer or by a casual player mom.

If the game is too difficult then it will frustrate the user and if it's too easy the gamer gets bored. Both cases have the same result: users quit playing our game. I wish there was a way to custom tailor the difficulty for each and every player... The solution is adaptive AI!

As we already wrote in an earlier post Miny can outsmart its opponents most of the time: he wins four times more - on average - than our lovely user base. This is not very balanced. We admit he's a little hard to beat and we're not surprised at this as he uses a quite optimal - thus very hard to beat - algorithm. But this can result in frustrated gamers and we don't want that.

Win ratio: miny vs. user base (june 2011)

As a solution we've introduced adaptive AI in Don't Mind the Mine (since version 1.0.5). This means that Miny won't be as smart - by default - as he was. By default, he won't have the same accuracy that he had. For instance, he won't take every visual information into consideration and will occasionally overlook things - just like a human makes a mistake. But as you play better and beat him more often and harder his accuracy will get better - to catch up with yours. ;)

We are very curios about the result and can't wait to find out how this will change the 1:4 win-ratio. See you later with up-to-date analytics data...