Snapshot VR Year in Review — 2020
It has been a heck of a year for Snapshot VR. We transitioned from alpha to beta to early access, and have now been live on both Viveport and Steam for just over 4 months.
We gathered data from our kill metrics datastore, which is stored in AWS DynamoDB, as well as from Github, Discord, our Changelog, and various other sources to put together as comprehensive of a lookback as possible for the previous year. Some of the numbers that we pulled are still shocking to me and Tanner. It has definitely been humbling for us to see our passion project become what it is today.
Let’s start with our beloved Community
We started 2020 with just over 200 Discord members, and today our community is 870 members strong, a growth rate of 335% over the year. That’s pretty cool.
We’ve seen over 1300 Snapshot accounts created and our daily active user base increases by about 10% monthly. It can be a grind to build a community for an early access game, especially a VR early access game, but we’re fairly happy with the pace so far.
We also entered the esports scene as the 6th game to join the VRML with a 9 week pre-season. There are currently 13 active teams of 3–4 members each going into our 7th week and the standings are as follows:
1st — Underdogs
2nd — Birthday Snatchers
3rd — Serial Chillerz
We, of course, couldn’t manage any of this without our mods. Thanks to Shiva, TickleMeElmo, Chillswitch Engage, Albifons, and Bushido for keeping this thing alive.
Tournaments
We saw 2 community-organized tournaments take place in 2020, each with their own format and rules, and with their own version of a prize pool. All in all we gave away roughly $500 in prizes this year to tournament participants.
Viveport Open
August 5th
3v3 Format
7 Teams
1st — Underage Ballers
2nd — Eastbound & Down
3rd — Blaze
Steam Open
October 3rd
5v5 Format
7 Teams
1st — Mod Squad
2nd — Team Breakfast
3rd — Blaze
Marek’s 1v1 Tournament didn’t make the cut by just 2 days, but we’ll make sure to include that in the 2021 recap.
The game changed…a lot
I think most of our alpha and beta players would agree that Snapshot is a different game than it was a year ago. A year ago Joystick Locomotion didn’t exist, players were getting stuck above the field, guns disappeared from your hands or holster randomly, players could keep shooting after they died, and there were only about 5 hand-crafted maps in the game.
Scrolling back through the git history, I counted 31 significant features that made their debut in Snapshot this year. I won’t list them all, but here are some highlights:
- Stat tracking with Snapshot accounts
- Custom maps with the 2D Paintball Field Creator
- A complete netcode swap, taking 3 months of dev time
- Voice chat
- Competitive mode
- Spectator cam, with all the bells and whistles
- Bots
- And so much more…including the all-knowing Ref Bot
Tanner and I released 56 versions of Snapshot (starting at v1.2.4 and ending on v2.2.15). We made 705 code commits, adding or changing 13,047 lines of code across 274 files. The game systems with the most changes this year were:
1st — The Game Server / Game Loop
2nd — Bot Infrastructure
3rd — Voice Chat
Arenas
We released support for user-created maps in March. Since then, we’ve seen matches on over 150 custom maps, including revisions, settling at 116 maps currently playable in the game today.
NXL Spain 2020 is by far the most popular map, home to 539 matches and 15,767 kills. NXL World Cup 2020, MPPL Event 1 2020, and GZ’s own “Holidaze” 5 Man maps were all in the top 5 of both categories as well.
The Gameplay Data
Very early on we started collecting basic player and position data for every kill that took place on Snapshot servers. We added to this data over time, which has let us pull some pretty interesting metrics from 2020. We’ll explore some of this data here and hand out some superlatives as well.
Let’s start with the high level. In 2020 our players logged 197,555 total kills within 7,572 matches. Our Top 5 Killers (not including bot kills) are:
Shiva — 7408
Foxkru — 5837
Marek — 5558
Bushido — 3409
Chillswitch Engage — 3127
Bots
We introduced bots to the game in October. While we filter these out from the SnapshotVR.com leaderboards, we still have the ability to include or exclude them from our ad-hoc queries.
Bots have had quite the run in the few months they’ve been alive. Bots have been killed 41,219 times by players while racking up 14,055 kills of their own. We also see plenty of bot vs. bot violence, where bots have killed each other over 50,000 times. Our most dangerous bot is “Bot 5”, who has over 7,000 kills by itself.
A lot of players practice or just spend some recreational time in the game playing bots, so we have to honor our Top 5 Bot Killers as well:
Marek — 2319
Fab — 2281
Leybron — 1479
gzinthehood — 1355
Uncle Randy — 1266
These players are the ones starting rooms and getting games going, so we really appreciate this crew.
Backstabbers
We started penalizing Team Kills this year, and it wouldn’t be a complete recap without acknowledging the worst offenders of Ref Bot’s favorite penalty.
Thankfully, we only saw 2978 team kills this year, about 3% of total kills excluding bots. Our Top (or bottom?) 5 Team Killers were:
Foxkru — 133
Chillswitch Engage — 103
Bushido — 85
Marek — 76
Uncle Randy — 64
Headshot!
In November we started tracking which collider was impacted to trigger each kill. This was to support the on-field and on-body hit visualizations that we released, but it also allows us to pull metrics about which parts of the player are hit most often.
The Most Often Hit Areas are:
Chest — 38.97%
Head — 12.52%
Left Thigh — 8.9%
Gun — 5.72%
Right Thigh — 4.87%
Our Least Often Hit Areas are the feet and, hilariously, the ball ends of the headbands that give the headbands physics , which were hit 59 times between the two tails. Notably, the pumpkin head Halloween cosmetic got shot 513 times.
The player with the most confirmed headshots so far is Czechmate with 390 headshots. Excluding bot kills, Marek leads with 214.
This is what we’re able to take away from our 2020 data. Again, we’re very happy with these results, and just pleased that we have the data to understand our game at this level. Have ideas for what we should track in 2021? Let us know in Discord.
Thanks for an amazing year!
- Jesse and Tanner
P.S — Blue team best team. Blue team accumulated over 30,000 more kills than the Pink team in 2020. So that’s settled… ;-)
