Hello fellow co-conspirators!
These past few weeks have been spent working on the tutorial of the game (man I think I’m like at the 5th revision). I’ll be honest it has been a bit gruelling to go over the same territory again and again, but every time I go at it, the game becomes stronger.
A recap for our new readers, the plan is to release a demo of the game early next year in order to gauge interest for the game as a whole. Being the weird, experimental game that it is, I need to make sure that people understand the game in order to see if they’ll like it. Right now I run at least two playtests every week (almost always with new players) and I’ve started noticing that they seem to get stuck in the same points (activation and connections). So that’s good; at least its not aweful all over.
Even though these are explained in the game, once players move to the next level, they seem to forget (even after successfully doing it once). In order to make sure each mechanic gets its due attention, I’ve drastically simplified the tutorial. Instead of trying to cram all the information into a single tutorial that looked like this:
I’ve now divided into three different stages that look like this:
Step by step and easy peezy. I am losing a bit of that exploration aspect I wanted the game to have, but it’s a small price to pay for players understanding the game.
The second thing I added are what I call backup panels. These are tutorial panels that pop up when players aren’t doing anything (i.e. they are lost). They idea here is to catch players who are confused when the vanilla tutorial is not enough (hence backup). Most players shouldn’t even see these, but for those that need it, they can be a lifesaver. It’s been tough figuring out where players get stuck and when they are just thinking, no one wants a ‘Hey, Listen!’ appearing when you’re deep in concentration. It’s still a wip, but all the playtests have been super useful to find out the correct timing for each backup panel.
Initial results have been promising, but there’s still a lot more testing to be done. The tutorial is one of the most important parts of the game, and even though sometimes it does seem like carrying a rock up a mountain, it is critical to get it right.
Happy conspiring!