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Game Developement: New Player Tutorial


BelgiumFury
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2 hours ago, BelgiumFury said:

However if your feedback is pure flaming, or completly unconstructive criticism it might very well get ignored.

However if your feedback is pure flaming, or completly unconstructive criticism it will get ignored

 

fixed that for us o7

p.s. the more constructive criticism we get the better the next draft can be so go ham


 

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You should not have them bring their infrastructure to 1000. Bring it to about 500, have a small raiding build for them, and show them to use the @### tool. 

Needs polishing. The tutorial should have less personality and be more straightforward. Try proof reading it further to make it as concise, descriptive, and easy to follow as possible. Following that, you should teach them specifically about opportunity cost and use examples. Explaining why farming isn't viable using actual numbers for what the tutorial nation template is would be way better than just saying "farms bad". So on and so forth. 

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I agree with what Velekk said above about using real examples.
I would like to add on that maybe explaining the acronyms and shorthand used throughout the game could be useful.

 

Nice work Belgium & crew!

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I'm going to run points as I read through the document so my ideas/reactions might be a bit all over the place, apologies in advanced.

Instead of telling the player to build up to 1000 infra I feel like offering them a "split" decision, something like "at your size raiding is by far the most efficient and profitable method to help you grow, however if you are more inclined to grow slow but peacefully then building to around 1000 infra might be more desirable. Click on the following guide depending on how you intend to grow, however raiding is HIGHLY recommended as you will fall behind other players."
The idea for this is to provide an option to players since many newbies enjoy roll playing a certain play style and 1000 infra is relatively bad for anybody who plans to raid, effectively wasting some of their limited early resources.

The rest of the guide seems pretty solid, however I feel like it is a tad wordy (then again, those who don't want to read probably won't hang around here). 

I don't know if it was mentioned, but making this easily accessible (In such a way that specific parts of the tutorial can be found and browsed even after completion) would definitely be appreciated.


Also in regards to the "railroad" I think that would honestly be a horrible idea, the one thing I know people hate the most in games is being forced into doing certain things repeatedly. If it isn't a new feature there is no need to give new pop-ups, reminders or guides in my opinion, plus so many people hang out around c3-5 for raiding that this "railroading" could actually become more annoying/detrimental than helpful. 

Tutorials are important, but you need to make sure user experience is also taken into account.

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Part of the beauty of politics and war is being taught the extra knowledge by veteran players or being the veteran who teaches it so I think a tutorial which is too in depth would take away from that. Some extra information on how alliances generally work and how they can differ from each other would be handy though so new players understand what alliance they really want to join.

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On 10/3/2022 at 6:42 AM, Velekk Hemlock said:

You should not have them bring their infrastructure to 1000. Bring it to about 500, have a small raiding build for them, and show them to use the @### tool. 

Needs polishing. The tutorial should have less personality and be more straightforward. Try proof reading it further to make it as concise, descriptive, and easy to follow as possible. Following that, you should teach them specifically about opportunity cost and use examples. Explaining why farming isn't viable using actual numbers for what the tutorial nation template is would be way better than just saying "farms bad". So on and so forth. 

1: Raiding with 1000 infra is easily doable; nothing too extreme. Agreed on the @ tool.
2: Sure, any concrete suggestions on polishing? We have indeed proof read this, im sure we missed things, that's why we asked here.
3: Agree on the farms things. Will do somethign similar for power plants.

On 10/3/2022 at 10:55 AM, Leo said:

I would like to add on that maybe explaining the acronyms and shorthand used throughout the game could be useful.

Nice work Belgium & crew!

1: How would we implement acronyms without it being forced, what would be the best way to approach this in your opinion?
2: Thanks!

On 10/3/2022 at 2:08 PM, Zevari said:

I'm going to run points as I read through the document so my ideas/reactions might be a bit all over the place, apologies in advanced.

Instead of telling the player to build up to 1000 infra I feel like offering them a "split" decision, something like "at your size raiding is by far the most efficient and profitable method to help you grow, however if you are more inclined to grow slow but peacefully then building to around 1000 infra might be more desirable. Click on the following guide depending on how you intend to grow, however raiding is HIGHLY recommended as you will fall behind other players."
The idea for this is to provide an option to players since many newbies enjoy roll playing a certain play style and 1000 infra is relatively bad for anybody who plans to raid, effectively wasting some of their limited early resources.

The rest of the guide seems pretty solid, however I feel like it is a tad wordy (then again, those who don't want to read probably won't hang around here). 

I don't know if it was mentioned, but making this easily accessible (In such a way that specific parts of the tutorial can be found and browsed even after completion) would definitely be appreciated.


Also in regards to the "railroad" I think that would honestly be a horrible idea, the one thing I know people hate the most in games is being forced into doing certain things repeatedly. If it isn't a new feature there is no need to give new pop-ups, reminders or guides in my opinion, plus so many people hang out around c3-5 for raiding that this "railroading" could actually become more annoying/detrimental than helpful. 

Tutorials are important, but you need to make sure user experience is also taken into account.

1: I just checked 3 alliances that I know do raiding (Rose, the Wei and e$) both build up to 1000 infra, it seems to me like that raiding at 1000 infra isn't some impossibility, from that point on people still have a choice what to do (be it farm and buildm ore infra or raid). 
2a: So in your opinion we should do a bit more hand holding after the tutorial to help them with raiding or am I misunderstanding you? Waht should we concretly do just explain it once and let them go do their thing?
2b: How can we help people further with farming, feel like the whole guide could be "wait" or am I wrong there?
3: It is indeed rather wordy; there is sadly enough also a lot to tell and we didnt want to bring it in the most boring way possible.
4:It will be accessible in that way.
5: The railroading would in no case be mandatory; but it seems like most people aren't in favor of "railroading" at all, so it won't happen.

On 10/3/2022 at 6:09 PM, RicardoTherodoric said:

Part of the beauty of politics and war is being taught the extra knowledge by veteran players or being the veteran who teaches it so I think a tutorial which is too in depth would take away from that. Some extra information on how alliances generally work and how they can differ from each other would be handy though so new players understand what alliance they really want to join.

At what point does a tutorial become too in depth?

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3 hours ago, BelgiumFury said:

1: I just checked 3 alliances that I know do raiding (Rose, the Wei and e$) both build up to 1000 infra, it seems to me like that raiding at 1000 infra isn't some impossibility, from that point on people still have a choice what to do (be it farm and buildm ore infra or raid). 
2a: So in your opinion we should do a bit more hand holding after the tutorial to help them with raiding or am I misunderstanding you? Waht should we concretly do just explain it once and let them go do their thing?
2b: How can we help people further with farming, feel like the whole guide could be "wait" or am I wrong there?
3: It is indeed rather wordy; there is sadly enough also a lot to tell and we didnt want to bring it in the most boring way possible.
4:It will be accessible in that way.
5: The railroading would in no case be mandatory; but it seems like most people aren't in favor of "railroading" at all, so it won't happen.

1: I just realised how poorly I approached that. Building to 1000 infra is perfectly fine (you need it for the slots) but I believe its important to inform the players that you don't need to stay at 1000 infra, since I know many newbies are inclined to rebuild every little bit of damage they take, which is super costly in the long run. (It was late and I haven't down a low infra build in years xD)

2a: Honestly I don't think people care about "hand holding" or "railroading" under the explicit scenarios where the play can choose to skip the process. So yeah, a bit of hand holding for the first raid war wouldn't be to bad honestly. You could honestly just create a "stasis" nation with no defensive slot limits that gives you unlimited maps to let them learn different mechanics through experience. E.g the fastest ways to beige, how different superiority work etc. The only hard part here would be the fact you need to code in a "tutorial nation" that works like that.

2b: Well "farming" isn't just waiting, you have half a dozen different income methods like market flipping, reward ads, baseball, community run servers (like casinos, banks etc) This guide would basically be teaching players about the various methods that could be used to make money outside of raiding. Not to mention there are a LOT of different builds to raise the "efficiency" of a nation.

3: That's fair, I would maybe recommend making some or even all of it possible to skip then. (Since it should be relatively easy to navigate back to as you said in point 4) 

5. Railroading is bad, I just feel like a lot of people have had tutorials ruined through forced menial and repetitive activities that teach you really basic stuff. A tutorial that takes longer than 5 minutes can really start to annoy people, especially if it's forcing them to do a relatively boring task.
Now I don't know how this tutorial will look/function visibly, but it's important to consider how long you are forcing someone to engage with the tutorial.

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On 10/10/2022 at 3:27 AM, BelgiumFury said:

2: Sure, any concrete suggestions on polishing? We have indeed proof read this, im sure we missed things, that's why we asked here.

"If you want to learn more about alliances we have a module in the tutorial that goes into detail. If you skip to that part don’t forget to come back and complete this module! If you want to complete this..." you should probably change "we" to "there is a module later in this tutorial that goes into further detail..."

This is nitpicky ofc but I feel that tone is important. In a game tutorial you typically do not want to refer to the authors of the tutorial in explaining it because it can cause confusion or otherwise break "immersion". I'll post some more examples when I have the chance of little edits. Overall the tutorial is very good and I 100% agree about making it too in-depth. Part of the game is learning. Mechanics should be learned, scenarios constructed around using those mechanics created, and vital information conveyed naturally, but they need to learn how to play themselves. 

 

The big failing of the current tutorial is that it doesn't convey the systems that the game operates under at all. Opportunity Cost and Return on Investment aren't mentioned so players don't think about it. Infra scaling isn't talked about. Farming is encouraged yet the mechanics are not explained. Etc. You're hitting a lot of the bases on introducing things AND not keeping vital mechanics hidden under a wiki somewhere. 

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new player responding to Belgium. first issue i see is extremely long loading times with excellent connection. thats a killjoy and it could be those alliance adverts or a phone setting. an investigation into this will help new players avoid frustration. 

 

the second issue i saw immediately is i want to see a spreadsheet showing how much food i have, coal, etc and not have to wait for 3 screens to load to see these. i get a hint from a revenue screen. however it takes up to 5 minutes to load different pages and i personally would like data on ny nation page. if it is there, as a new player i cant see it and i grow weary of clicking and waiting every 2 minutes to load the browser. 

trying to stay enthusiastic and hope this helps. 

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Well, im new and i would love to have other sports teams, i dont hate baseball but being realistic the football soccer is more famous than baseball and i think a soccer team or basketball team would be awesome bcause y can have 3 stadiums, but 3 baseball stadiums? That sounds absurd, with more sports this sounds more logic and it could entertein a little more.

And production of any resource as a new player is not worth, maybe that could be fixed but well im still new maybe this problem change in a few weeks for me.

Greets ✌️

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

I think this tutorial works very well. I particularly like objective 24 with the buy 10k soldiers stuff. I really like that you leave it up to alliances to teach them more about the game since every alliance has its way of doing things. The tutorial "sucks" in that it doesn't tell you much, but that is completely fine by me. Every step after the tutorial I am sure my alliance does slightly different to many others

 

Only thing is: why the farms? 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I read this and enjoyed it though I have some questions on some details.  

As an example:

Your Turn

Enough talking, let’s get building! Your new city needs some infrastructure. Currently, it has 100 infrastructure, let’s upgrade that to 1000. There are two ways to build infrastructure. In the “Buy/Sell Infrastructure” box you can type how much extra infrastructure you want (in this case 900). The other way to build infrastructure is to type “@” before the exact amount of infrastructure you want to end up with (in this case @1000).

If I followed this, I would nod my head and type in "900" in the infrastructure box, going directly from 100 to 1000 as you instruct.  But I'm sure I've been told by people on Discord to buy in lots of 100 at a time.  This sort of thing continues on: it appears your next instruction is to directly and specifically buy 750 land, though again I've been told this isn't ideal.  However if buying 750 is indeed cheaper than buying it at 250 three times or 250 and 500, please add that to the tutorial.

Am I misunderstanding what you wrote, or is this (the price difference) something that doesn't really matter?

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2 hours ago, Dan Sinclair said:

- Snip -

As a general rule of thumb, infra should be bought in multiples of 100 (100, 200, 300, 400, etc) and land in multiples of 500 (500, 1000, 1500, etc). For max efficiency, though the difference between this and the rule of thumb I just mentioned is generally negligible, you would buy 100 infra at a time or 500 land at a time until the amount you have left to buy is less than that.

That section of the tutorial is primarily to help you become accustomed to infra and land purchasing (among a few other things) and getting you up to what is usaually considered the "minimum" amounts of infra and land.

Hope my response helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

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Federation of Knox

Enlightened of Chaos, Event Horizon

QA Team and API Team

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