Zombie Fortress: When Analytics Help Player Experience Click

Katya Sabirova

Released in December 2025, Zombie Fortress quickly found its audience, gathering over 10,000 player reviews with an average rating of 4.3. With live ops and further development underway, we take a look behind the scenes at NLABSOFT — their team, their process, and how the partnership with SayGames supports the game’s continued growth.

(Originally published in Inven)

From Core Vision to Final Game

For NLABSOFT, Zombie Fortress started with a very clear idea of what the game should feel like.

“What we’re most proud of is that Zombie Fortress fully delivers the core idea behind its original prototype name — ‘Zombie Crusher,’” says Jaehyun Joo, CEO of NLABSOFT. “From the beginning, our goal was to create a game that feels effortless to play on mobile, while delivering the pure satisfaction of crushing waves of zombies in a bold, visual way.”

While the zombie theme itself is familiar to a global audience, the team wanted to move beyond a traditional tower defense experience. Instead of standard towers, the gameplay is built around traps — allowing players to smash, shred, and wipe out incoming zombies in spectacular bursts.

A key part of development focused on finding the right balance between clarity and depth — making the game immediately readable while ensuring that each session remained engaging as complexity increased. “We spent a lot of time fine-tuning that balance between simplicity and impact, and we’re very happy with where it landed,” Jaehyun says.

Beyond mechanics, the team also wanted Zombie Fortress to carry emotional weight. “Inspired by The Last of Us, we chose a young girl as the protagonist, placing her in a devastated world to add a subtle narrative layer,” Jaehyun notes.

Turning Data into Real Product Conversations

Zombie Fortress went through several iterations during development — including two major pivots that fundamentally reshaped the game. While early prototype tests showed strong potential, with promising retention and session length, they also revealed clear challenges, particularly around onboarding and meta complexity for a broad global audience.“With limited internal data at that stage, it was difficult for us to clearly define the right direction,” Jaehyun recalls.

According to Jaehyun, collaboration with the publisher played a key role in structuring product decisions. “Once we started working with SayGames, we were able to approach improvements step by step,” he says. “Access to broader data and regular, data-driven discussions helped us validate assumptions instead of guessing.”

Danila Katalev, Producer at SayGames, highlights the shared mindset behind that process:

“We were very happy to meet partners who share our data-driven approach. We value the opportunity to review every test, every release, every product change in detail — together.”

In earlier versions, players earned gold after each wave and used it to buy towers, upgrade the archer, and increase income per battle. While functional, this system added friction and made onboarding heavier than intended.

The first pivot restructured the purchase flow: towers were moved into a bottom menu, and players could upgrade the probability of receiving higher-quality tower options. It improved clarity, but still relied on currency management.

The second pivot simplified the loop entirely. Gold and the purchase menu were removed. Instead, after each wave, players chose a tower or a perk to enhance their build. This reduced cognitive load, made progression more intuitive, and helped strengthen the core metrics.

These pivots were part of a deliberate search for growth points in the core loop — and each iteration led to clear improvements in funnel performance, retention, and overall lifetime engagement. By refining onboarding and simplifying progression, the team strengthened key metrics and gained the confidence to move toward global launch.

As the project evolved, analytics became a central tool for navigating product decisions. By February 2026, more than 100 new analytical events had been implemented, expanding the team’s ability to observe, test, and refine the player journey at every stage.

Danila explains: “The game is supported by 116 standard dashboards from our internal analytics system. In addition, we built 12 custom dashboards specifically for Zombie Fortress to better understand how players interact with the game. Our main goal was to provide as much data as possible to design and validate hypotheses for improving the product.”

Through extensive A/B testing — covering core features, pricing models, and content balance — the team was able to test hypotheses quickly and pivot with confidence. Since global launch, one of the level-balance dashboards alone has been accessed more than 1,186 times, reflecting the team’s ongoing attention to fine-tuning the player experience.

Danila emphasizes that analytics only works when paired with clear creative direction:

“Even the largest knowledge base and the most advanced analytics won’t lead to success without a clear vision of what the game should be,” he says. “From day one, it was obvious that the NLABSOFT team had a precise understanding of the experience they wanted to deliver and the story they wanted to tell.” 

“SayGames consistently respected our creative vision while providing objective input from a global market point of view,” Jaehyun notes.

The collaboration extended well beyond reports and dashboards. Jaehyun highlights the hands-on involvement of the publishing team. “SayGames team — including leadership — played the game a lot and gave very practical feedback on design and balance,” he says. “That gave us confidence to pause, rethink, and rebuild when necessary.”

Danila shares a similar impression: “The NLABSOFT team are not just professionals. Our product discussions often felt like meetings of a closed club of Tower Defense fans — where entry requires thousands of hours spent in the genre.”

Jaehyun sums up the partnership with a metaphor that captures the dynamic clearly: “We had built a solid ship and prepared a map to cross the Pacific toward a treasure island. SayGames helped us interpret that map correctly — and became both our radar and our lighthouse along the way.”

Why Execution Speed Is NLABSOFT’s Superpower

That iterative approach is closely tied to how NLABSOFT works as a team.

The studio is small but highly experienced, built around members who have been developing mobile games together since 2010. Years of working side by side have resulted in a tight, high-trust collaboration structure where teamwork comes naturally.

“Every team member is a specialist in their field, but also capable of wearing multiple hats,” Jaehyun explains. “Designers, artists, and developers are involved from the earliest stages, making decisions together based on problems rather than job titles.”

This flexibility shapes the studio’s creative process. Designers don’t think only about mechanics — they constantly consider how a moment will read instantly, even in a short marketing video. That mindset influences how ideas are evaluated and refined across the team.

Rather than polishing concepts in isolation, NLABSOFT focuses on building and validating quickly. “We prefer to visualize ideas early and let real player feedback guide our decisions,” Jaehyun says. “Holding onto concepts for too long without testing them just slows you down.”

One approach that reflects this philosophy is the studio’s Art Camp method. Similar to songwriting camps in music, these are short, focused workshops that bring together internal and external concept artists to explore a wide range of visual themes.

The team sketches contrasting concepts — from cavemen versus dinosaurs to farmers versus plants or humans versus zombies — and runs CPI tests for each. “By validating which worlds and visuals resonate most with players, we select the final art direction based on data rather than intuition alone,” Jaehyun explains. “Both Tiny Warriors Rush and Zombie Fortress emerged directly from this process.”

When asked about the team’s defining strength, Jaehyun doesn’t point to any single discipline. “If we had to define our superpower, it wouldn’t be an individual skill,” he says. “It would be teamwork-driven execution speed — the ability to turn ideas into strong prototypes quickly and shape them into market-ready products without losing focus.”

Looking Ahead

For NLABSOFT, Zombie Fortress is not an endpoint but a continuation — a game shaped by iteration, trust, and a team built to move fast. As live operations continue and the project evolves, the experience gained through this collaboration with SayGames provides a solid foundation for what comes next, both for the game itself and for future projects built together.