Hi everyone,
Last week was mostly spent on working through the tutorial to bring in and explain the new mechanics of version 0.8.
While there have been a lot of smaller changes to the setup of Opal Reef to accommodate the new mechanics, I won’t bore you with the details, and will instead try to talk about the 2 big decisions we made to upgrade the tutorial. The first big decision was whether to make the tutorial short and streamlined to simply teaching mechanics (maybe even breaking it up into small lessons), or to create one longer tutorial that taught the mechanics in a more narrative style.
There are of course pros and cons to both. John in particular has a habit of rushing through tutorials quickly in order to get to the “meat” of the game, so he was in favour of shorter tutorials with a distinct lesson each. I on the other hand am more likely to play longer tutorials - or maybe the sort of games that lend themselves to longer tutorials. The decision came down to how we saw the mechanics, and by extension the lessons we needed to teach. In some games, mechanics are rather self-contained, and can be taught independently - but the mechanics in PtP are already pretty dependent on each other, and we are only planning to make them more interlinked.
As a result, we decided to go for a longer tutorial (maybe 1 - 1.5 hours), in which players are going to go through an entire, abbreviated game with many intermediate goals. Adding intermediate goals to the more “sandbox” game is also our goal with the addition of random quests with version 0.10, but the tutorial will give us the opportunity to lead new players through an entire game without getting lost (figuratively and literally), before rolling out the 0.10 update, and having the experience we are aiming for them to have in every game in the long run.
This decision has meant that we will also be in need of switching the map (Opal Reef) to accommodate a longer game, bringing it more in line with the style of Pirate’s Peak (big decisions #2). With that, we are able to better explain the new mechanics, and actually make the longer game on Opal Reef enjoyable - hopefully meaning that players will be tempted to stay a few more turns after finishing the main tutorial in order to explore the additional aspects of the game for themselves. As usual, I will keep you updated.
Until next week!