Turmoil in Tutorial Land

I'd estimate that I've spent close to 500 hours developing this game, to date. I know the buttons, the flow, the little idiosyncracies. I know this game - so when it came to writing the tutorial I figured it would be a straight forward task.

The reality

I'm almost certainly the worst person to test the tutorial. I thought it was great. It worked because I followed its instructions and I knew the what the guide was trying to teach me. I gave it to three friends.

• A developer
• A board gamer
• A friend who games but never heavy strategy games

Laughter, followed by telling me everything I'd rather not hear.

A tale of three tutees

I don't know if tutees is a word, but let's go with it. Our first tester, a sharp developer with a great eye for UI and tutorials exclaimed just how much information I was trying to impart. Too many buttons, left, right, top - everything competing for attention. I was realising just how much there was in a little game that had begun life months ago as a plaything to get trains to run around a map.

The feedback was a flow of thoughts - unfiltered and honest. Where is Found Company button?, Where are any of the buttons?! Particularly those not immediately on screen, Track button to highlight what?, Buttons should highlight for any given button Transition effect from tutorial steps, Tutorial window update is a little confusing, not clear its updated, needs more obvious changing UI, big ticks, big text change, whatever. Highlight Companies button for Open Company and Info button, How to change to tunnel mode, The Track Tunnel button stays on the last selection change to Construction? Show mountain tunnel when hovering over mountain - not just when pushed past mountain, No info how to build station Do not show station dropdown until you've clicked add stop, once selected, auto add ? Dropdown as is kinda looks like its in the route already and Density of info is too much on many screens

Just one 5 minute test produced this great feedback. All of it completely true, useful and immensely helpful.

The failure

Our second tutee jumped in late at night after a busy day. The idea was to get the task done as a favour to me. He failed because I failed to help the tutorial guide the player through the most complex, and un-intuitive, part of the tutorial - Improving Operations. The game needs a way to punish fast growth because we don't want to reward a player for buying trains faster than everyone else and reaping the rewards of many services before other players realise they can afford them. Operations levels slow down growth and increase the cost of administration whilst allowing for extra trains to be purchased and services to be run. But it has no bearing in the real world and it's simply not obvious why a player needs to do it. Where can a player find the ability to upgrade their operations. Playtesters looked under "Trains", "Construction" and clicked their HQ. Nothing suggested that the innoculous Info panel hid the solution. More thought needs to go here!

The redemption arc

I vowed to impress my next tutee. The first test you have with a willing playtester is the most useful feedback you can get. They don't know the game, your aims and when they get stuck and you guide them, they've stored that information without really realising it so it invalidates every future test in a slight inperceptable fashion.

Just ignore that message, it doesn't really matter at the moment

Every future tester will wonder about that message but if you don't explain it properly it never gets understood - or worst still it'll confuse players and impact their enjoyment.

So, on to test subject number 3. A chaotic test of everything! This tester hadn't realised the nice pulsing buttons were a hint as to what to do - and when he did discover the guiding pulse that became the focus in order to be able to skip what he was being asked to do. He was more confused than our first intrepid tester because we'd allowed him to speed up. He became frustrated that he couldn't get enjoyment from the game that he didn't understand because he felt the game was pushing him to complete actions before he understood why he was doing so. Still, valuable feedback came back. Why couldn't he afford a £150 station when his cash clearly showed £500 (answer, the company treasury was less than £150) - but of course this is embedded in my understanding and a completely alien idea to someone who hasn't played an 18xx game before.

More useful feedback came back. How can you tell a train is a passenger train or a freight/cargo train? (Let's move the descriptions of each train to a more prominent place - because there are too many cells of information to the right of each train), he didn't understand why he couldn't buy a 3rd train (the Operations Limit wasn't clear enough) and why did the share price matter (thie one we'll save for another day!)

Slowly our tester was able to achieve a little more and another useful nugget of information was spilled - he wanted to see the progress of contracts without having to have the contracts panel open. A great idea from nowhere!

He felt the need to apologise without understanding he had provided compelling feedback in so many areas. In fact, I'm not sure he believed my gratefulness, but it was absolutely sincere.

The outcome

2 more days ahead to work on the feedback before I can even begin to look for more tutorial initiates. One step forward, two steps back.