I’m opening this thread to talk about basically a full rework of the early tutorial flow to make it better for new players.
I’m opening this thread as I’m struggling to get this big PR reviewed:
As with any big change, the initial reaction is to reject the changes to familiar things. But after multiple rounds of looking at the changes, I’m slowly starting to lean towards the viewpoint that we should try to improve the tutorial flow. This will help to make the game more approachable.
I think the main focus of a tutorial rework should be to redo the entire flow of the tutorial and then adjust the wording to make sure later concepts are not talked about earlier than they are introduced and simple terms are always used before using any technical terms.
If that is the main idea then that open PR doesn’t go far enough in my opinion. So I think that the way forward with a tutorial rework is to slightly polish up that PR a bit, probably revert some stuff, merge it, and then I will do a more extreme shake up of the tutorial flow as a separate change and redo all wording in the tutorial texts that require changes.
Here’s my suggestion for the new early game flow (obviously if tutorials are turned off, then locking parts of the game until later is disabled). Also before being able to do this I think I need to refactor the tutorials so that the option to disable them is removed because returning players seem to turn off tutorials when the tutorial has like 30% more messages in it than when they actually last played it. So I will make a change this week where tutorials can only entirely be disabled from the options menu and the in-game option only allows picking between all tutorials and tutorials not yet seen by the player (in any playthrough). Also there’s been an idea floating around where non-critical stats in the editor right panel are moved down so that the more important info is visible without scrolling down which should help with learnability. I think this change is also needed to be done before reworking the tutorials.
That got a bit long but here’s the new tutorial flow I think would be optimal:
- Welcome to microbe tutorial (with option to toggle between show all tutorials and hide tutorials seen by the player in any playthrough). In the initial HUD state we would hide the compounds and environment panels to have less things on screen.
- Immediately after closing the “pick movement style” popup will trigger
- After selecting the movement mode the movement tutorial begins
- I don’t think we need to adjust the timing of this tutorial as the movement style popup has videos about the movement showing the cursor, so I think the player will be primed to then have a go themselves, but I’d keep the text popup still as a backup
- Once movement tutorial is done the compounds panel is automatically opened showing the player the glucose, ammonia, and phosphate bars.
- Once the player’s glucose has gone down a bit (which is basically always the case once the movement tutorial is over), the tutorial about finding glucose triggers
- Then we have the usual tutorials about the reproduction progress etc. editor button tutorial if the player doesn’t realize to press it. So far the flow is basically the same
- When the player enters the editor this is where things get really interesting: we’ll directly dump the player into the cell editor tab and hide the other tabs
- So the player then goes through the organelle selection, placing, undo, and redo tutorials. I think this is still a good sequence to force the player to use the undo/redo functions and not allow the player to skip them. This sequence is relatively long but if this is the only tutorials in the first editor cycle, I think it is well paced. I disagree with making the undo tutorial only trigger when placing the nucleus as I think that this core tutorial shouldn’t be skippable until the player places the nucleus (which requires scrolling the left panel). Before we had a forced undo tutorial we got a ton of questions about players asking how to undo, so I think this is such a core concept that we cannot allow the player to progress without using this feature. The tutorial about what to build initially could be changed to mention that getting one or two hydrogenase + cytoplasm in the first editor cycle is always a safe choice.
- Then the player exits the editor and goes back to swimming around
- Now the usual tutorials about organelle division and finding a chunk to engulf can trigger like normal.
- When the player next gets to the editor we will start them now in the report tab explaining a bit about the population numbers and how they can see the other species they inhabit with in the current location. Maybe there should be a tutorial later on explaining the gas graphs once it is likely they have changed?
- On pressing next they get to the cell editor and the usual tutorial (maybe it is now the ATP balance bar tutorial?) triggers
- On going back to the swimming around portion I think we should insert a new tutorial about the process panel here (instead of getting the “struggling” tutorial)
- Once back in the editor we again start on the report tab and this time show the “welcome back, nucleus is the early goal” tutorial which primes the player about finding a good place to live and a food source
- Then we finally go to the patch map tab and explain it
- And then in the cell tab we now trigger the staying small / heading to the surface tutorial
- I’m not sure where this would fit but I think we need a new tutorial about the compound balances display. Maybe it could trigger in this or a few later editor cycles, or the first time the player places an organelle that produces glucose rather than ATP to explain the critical difference between those kinds of organelles?
- Now once the player exits the editor we maybe could have one more gameplay tutorial? Not sure what would go here. Maybe this would be the time to show the environment panel? Though this is pretty late so I think the environment panel should become visible earlier if the player gets hit with radiation or reaches a patch with sunlight. But the full explanation about the environment panel could be placed here. As explaining how process panel numbers with environmental inputs depend on the environment panel go here.
- Now we can probably show the environmental conditions graph tutorial and also mention the food chain tab (which the player if they visit can trigger another tutorial, which makes it easier then to explain the auto-evo prediction, but I wouldn’t make this tutorial a requirement)
- On returning to the cell editor the player will finally get the auto-evo prediction tutorial, which is the most number heavy screen. And this is basically the last primary flow editor tutorial.
- This same editor cycle if the player goes to the patch map we could have a new tutorial about migrations and populations in general (this would trigger any editor cycle after the first one where the patch map is available and that other tutorial has been seen)
- And now finally exiting the editor the player gets the tutorial asking if they are still struggling and would like to view the help pages, which concludes the primary tutorials, and only context dependent tutorials are left (with a couple of generation dependent tutorials about guiding placing the nucleus and binding agents to advance in the game).
I think that would be a big improvement to the flow of the early game tutorial. Any thoughts? I think with these placement changes almost all of the tutorials will need at least slight wording changes to make sure they prime the player to see the next tutorial as a logical sequence (for example "goal: nucleus, but you need a good patch with steady food, patch screen: here’s the available patches and how you can move, cell editor: a good first time playstyle is to head to the surface and be a photosynthesiser).
One more thing was brought up which is that the tutorials could focus a bit more on a “story” about the player. Like rather than wording things like explaining what they are, focusing a bit more on like “your goal is to get the nucleus” rather than just mechanically describing things available to the player (so trying to relate them more to the evolutionary journey). This might be the hardest part for me but I will try. The end result might be that all of our tutorials are wordier than before.
We’d still obviously have all the later and other context sensitive tutorials, like a few generations after showing the chemoreceptor prompt and modifiable organelle tutorials etc. and on gen 10 the tutorial about reminding of the nucleus is triggered.
This will be a lot of work for me, but after this I think I’m hopefully allowed to reject any reworks of the tutorials by saying that this was the one chance when I would allow it. Of course new tutorials and slight wording adjustments that are clearly superior, I’d allow and review.
One part I’m unsure on is if the welcome to the game messages actually need changing. I think they are already very good in setting up how life is starting. And at least the suggestions for new wording by @Thim make the different start wording much more uniform which I think detracts from having the flavour text in the first place for the different starting options.
To get insight on the opinions from the rest of the team here’s some polls:
- Yes
- No
- No but slight wording updates would be good
- Yes
- Depends on how good the new wording is
- No
- Yes
- Only a bit longer
- No
So besides those poll answers, does anyone want to comment on this? I think this is a very important discussion to have as this needs to be done before the microbe stage is done, so I think this is much, much higher priority than discussing any later part of the game.
