Achievement: 100k Bineroo grids completed

Published on November 29, 2022

Bineroo was initially released in August 2020. Back then, it was a side project I developed during the pandemic to learn Flutter. A bit more than two years later, It reached a important milestone and I would like to share some insights.

---

For those who already know what Bineroo is, you can skip the introduction and directly dive into the exciting part.

👋Introduction

I won’t lie: Bineroo is an adaptation of an existing game known as Binero, Takuzu, or Binairo depending on the country. I never claimed the paternity of the game concept. I tried to revisit it and give it a new perspective by adding nice new features.

Basically, it is a binary puzzle where you need to fill grids with black and white circles by respecting 3 rules:

• Rule 1: Equal number of blacks and whites in each column and row

• Rule 2: No more than 2 adjacent circles of the same color

• Rule 3: Each row is unique. Each column is unique

Here is the trailer for the v1.7 release. This gives a pretty good overview of the gameplay.

It is available on both Google Playstore and Apple Appstore

PlayStore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dargil.bineroo

AppStore: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1457498721

NB: I am working on web and desktop versions. That’s the cool part with Flutter. So stay tuned.

🔢 Custom metrics

I have been collecting data about game usage nearly since the beginning. It allows me to monitor the habits of the players and the adoption of newly released features.

In addition to all the basic metrics provided by the analytic platform (DAU, MAU …), there are a few other ones that I watch closely:

• The number of played grids per day is a good indicator of the global game activity

• The percentage of completed grids per day is interesting to monitor to make sure we didn’t introduce a new feature that makes the game neither too difficult (=frustrating) nor too easy (=boring).

• The average numbers of played and completed grids per active user are indicators of the players’ engagement

🎉 The 100k milestone

I am proud to announce today that the game hit a major milestone with 100k grids successfully completed by players.

This is a pretty big achievement that gives me the motivation to keep going in this direction. Thanks a lot to all players ❤️

🚀 Next: the 1M milestone

Now the big question is when will the game hit the million grids completed milestone? I hope not in ten years 😆

Let’s start by looking at the evolution over time.

The graph shows a real acceleration over time which is very good news as it means more and more engagement (more players and/or more grids completed per player).

It also means that it will take less time to complete the next 100k grids. But how much time exactly?

This is where it really gets funny and geeky.

Google spreadsheet provides the possibility to show trendlines for a data series plotted on a graph. The default configuration is a linear trendline but there is a bunch of other possibilities (exponential, polynomial, logarithmic …). In our case, the best type is polynomial. You can even choose the polynomial degree (up to 10) to stick as close as possible to the raw data.

The equation can be displayed as the trendline label on the graph. So in our case, if we use a 3-degree polynomial type (which is good enough), here is the equation:

Once we have the equation, we can use it to calculate future milestones. You can do it by hand if you have the time and energy to do so but I am a bit lazy so I delegated this tedious task to an online calculator 😎

I just googled “solve polynomials equation online” and picked the first result https://www.symbolab.com/solver/polynomial-equation-calculator

Now we can have the answers to our questions.

While it took a bit more than 2 years to get to the first 100k completed grids, the next 100k completed grids should be reached in roughly 251 days.

So let’s set a reminder for Sunday, August 6th, 2023 to see where we will be with this milestone 📆

And now the answer to the big question “when will the game hit the million completed grids milestone?”

Drum rolls …

It will take 3 more years 🎉

The exact date is Wednesday, 17 December 2025

Ok, this is not 10 years but still it is too far. I want to make it in a year. So I need to come up with a plan.

What about a community challenge?

And you, can you help me? do you have any ideas to propose? I am all ears.