View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0021850 | AI War 2 | Gameplay Issue | Oct 19, 2019 12:39 pm | Oct 23, 2019 4:36 pm | |
| Reporter | Asteroid | Assigned To | |||
| Severity | major | ||||
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 0.954 Hacking Log! | ||||
| Summary | 0021850: Proper handholding guidance in tutorials | ||||
| Description | Modern tutorials will typically prevent all actions from the player that could put you "out-of-sync" with what the tutorial is telling you to do. Not so here, you can send your units to another system than the one you've been instructed to, even get them killed and the tutorial doesn't acknowledge it at all. A fist step towards improvement would be to acknowledge that the units necessary for the tutorial don't exist anymore, and prompt the user to restart. Beyond that, you really want to block wormholes that shouldn't be accessed, prevent selecting units you shouldn't touch at the moment, and so on. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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I mean, we could do that, but I'm not sure it's really biting many people in the target audience here. Has this actually come up? |
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Nope AFAIK it hasn't come up. Would be nice to have some telemetry in place because the audience that would need this isn't the one that would post on forums IMO. So it'll never come up unless we look for it. |
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If you need that much handholding you probably aren't going to survive facing the AI.... |
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@BadgerBadger Imagine a tired dad comes home and decides to try your game in the hour he has between putting his kids to sleep and going to bed himself. His eyes glaze over the lengthy tutorial text and he reads the planet name wrong and sends his units to the other one. He's confused about not getting another prompt, looks around, and then they get killed. Already getting a headache and not willing to waste more of his time, he decides to try again some other time and go plays something else. He ends up never feeling like trying the AI War 2 again because of the bad first impression and refunds. When his friends ask him how was that game he was thinking of trying, he responds unenthusiastically, and his friends don't buy the game. Maybe that guy was actually rather smart and would've fared well against the AI if he played during the weekend when he's a bit less tired. But now he's never gonna be a player. Never underestimate how competition from other games or just personal circumstances can reduce player's attention span and "effective IQ" when they're trying out your game. The brain resources they give you can massively increase after a positive first impression. |
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There's also the fact that modern handholding tutorials typically force you to read a lot less text, because they visually show you what you're supposed to do (make everything dark except what you're supposed to click, etc). Less text is good. I beat AI War 2 on my first try on difficulty 6, yet I bounced off *4 times* over the course of a few years off the AI War 1 tutorial because I was literally falling asleep, between the verbose text, complex UI and jumble of icons. Now AI War 2 is already in a better place with shorter tutorials and a somewhat more welcoming UI, but I believe we can do even better to win over new players. |
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Case in point for the people getting confused and sending ships to the wrong planet: https://steamcommunity.com/app/573410/discussions/1/1606022547928815927/ This particular one could be alleviated by giving planets very different names in the tutorials, at least. |
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I think the current Tutorial is actually fairly decent. It has some issues to improve it (opened a ticket which covers the tutorials I ran (1-4)), but it does cover the basics as far as I got. Maybe highlight some words in other colours (like target planets, fleet names for what you're to select), or even better, have the "DO THIS NOW" thing as a single item that's a different colour and font at the bottom of the tutorial page (before the extra tips (which are nice!)). "Select ship X and send it to planet Y". etc. That's the easiest thing to implement over forcing disablement of half the UI. Then it's up to the user if they want to read the full blurb or not. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 19, 2019 12:39 pm | Asteroid | New Issue | |
| Oct 19, 2019 1:41 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0053796 | |
| Oct 19, 2019 2:09 pm | Asteroid | Note Added: 0053797 | |
| Oct 19, 2019 4:28 pm | BadgerBadger | Note Added: 0053799 | |
| Oct 19, 2019 7:53 pm | Asteroid | Note Added: 0053803 | |
| Oct 19, 2019 8:07 pm | Asteroid | Note Added: 0053804 | |
| Oct 23, 2019 1:32 am | Asteroid | Note Added: 0053842 | |
| Oct 23, 2019 4:36 pm | yupyip | Note Added: 0053882 |
