I’m a big fan of games with minimal or no tutorial, the ‘figure it out’ style of gameplay. Unfortunately I'm also making a game with many things going on at once. Those 2 things do not go together well, so I've been doing what I can to make as minimalistic of a ‘tutorial’ as possible.
I’ve seen two main issues with new players’ first runs:
Tutorial steps are missed for various reasons (timed reading, busy in combat, other menus overriding, etc.)
People are annoyed with the frequent pausing of the game to have things explained
I think this new checklist style system is a much better solution to the above issues, and will drastically improve the new player experience. Feedback is greatly appreciated.
New
The mission gameplay tutorial has been re-made into a checklist style. (existing players can turn it off right away in the settings)
Updates
Slow/Debuff/Weak applied to enemies now stack strength (was duration). With the fast paced combat of this game, stacking duration mostly ended up making these statuses useless to stack repeatedly. This also increases the value of status strength stat improvements for these.
Weaken and Slow status applied to enemies is now multiplicative on top of all other effects. This was an oversight within the code on my part and was always intended to be this way. Effectively should make these effects much more noticeable at high difficulties/late stage runs.
‘Debuff’ has been replaced with ‘Vulnerable’. I’m sure I probably missed a couple in menus so let me know if you find references to debuff anywhere still
Various CPU optimizations for enemy damage calculations
Demo
Updated to match