The need for tutorials

After hearing feedback and watching a few people play the game, I decided to add a small tutorial stage to AraCore Astromining Ventures.

My initial vision for the start of the game is that the player is quite quickly thrown into a chaotic, overwhelming situation about which they know very little. The idea is that the player will just have to deal with what happens, whatever happens. But hey, it's a game, and you can restart the stage.

Confusion is Ok, but people don't like it

Over the course of gaming history, it seems more and more single player games have shied away from letting the player easily and quickly fail. Older arcade-style games were built on this principle, but now a 'quick' failure is rarer. There are few one-hit-kills games in the popular sphere in faviour of carefully-guiding the player to success.

In the original start to AraCore Astormining Ventures , the player is given instructions with five controls (forward, backward, turn left, turn right, fire), then their dron ship launches and they have to deflect or destroy some incoming rogue asteroids. The chances of destroying all the asteroids is very low; initially, even hitting them is tricky. Some players were flying at full speed around the screen firing like they had a machine gun, and that method generally led to failure: hitting a fast moving target while you're also moving quickly is hard.

The main issue most have with the game is that everything you need to know is given to you in dialogue by the game's characters. What everyone should know about a lot of gamers is that they do not want to read things. So the instructions that let the player know some key things are just missed, things such as how you have a limited amount of 'ammunition'.

Componding this of course is a purposeful design decision on my part to have the game's dialogue and conversations take place at the same time as the action: time does not stop when someone is talking to you, so you have to decide to read what someone is saying to you, delay it, or ignore it alltogether. I wanted this to be the case, especially on the first stage: there's chaos outside, people are shouting at you, telling you what to do, blaming you, and you just have to deal with it. But for many, it was too much.

We don't want to put people off

I lack the required hubris to force people to endure what I wanted them to: this is a game, and it should be enjoyable, so a simple tutorial is now in place. It puts the player in a small environment with no time limit and shows how to move the ship, fire projectiles to deflect asteroids, and move asteroids around for collection. It takes less than 3 minutes, has no pressure, simple objectives, little to read, and no real consequences. From this, the player learns the basic mechanics of the game. Currently, the player can still 'fail' all three mini missions in the tutorial, and I could force a do-over if this happens, but hey, you can restart it if you're not happy with your performance!