How and why did the developers of the Auro puzzle change the tutorial?

The authors of the Auro tactical puzzle from the Dinofarm Games studio shared on their blog the story of how they changed the training mode in their game. A little below is the version of the material in Russian.

Since the release of Auro this winter, we have received a lot of cool and useful feedback. Firstly, almost all user reviews were five-star. Many-almost everyone who wrote to us-seemed to love our game. This is good news.

On the other hand, some five-star reviews sounded something like this:

“You know, when I first tried Auro, I was confused and depressed. 31 missions in the tutorial? Damn it! I was lucky, I decided to give the game a second chance and turned on Play Mode (the main game mode, approx.editorial offices). And, wow, I’m glad I did it, because now I really really love this game.”

This is not a real review, but I swear we read a bunch of reviews/posts/comments that were very similar to it.

In general, we are happy for this guy, but such a comment leads us to the question: How many people didn’t give Auro a second chance? How many people got dizzy from a large number of tutorials and left the game? We have no way of knowing the answer, but even if it were a small number, we would like them to have the opportunity to enjoy the game too.

Auro is not a difficult game to learn, but it’s not Flappy Bird either. Our game has quite intuitive key mechanics with a simple task (to throw all the monsters into the water), but it also has a lot of special abilities and combinations that you need to know about.

I have no doubt that as soon as people begin to understand how to play, they fall in love with the project. The question is how to make them understand the game?

The current tutorial

A little secret about the Auro tutorial: I programmed and designed it two weeks before the release. Some of you, especially Android players, know that before the first iOS version, Auro had a different game mode – Story Mode. It had cutscenes and very simple gameplay, within which some training moments were also embedded.

In truth, he was a nightmare. When we kicked him out of the game, we received only one negative feedback in response. Imagine: we remove a big feature and get a number of regrets and complaints close to zero!

Story Mode could not cope with the training, tried to talk about the world of the game, and also tried to be interesting for re-passing. He chased three hares and didn’t catch one.

So I sawed it all out of the new mode. But I still wanted it to be interesting to play, so I gave up hard scripting.

Further, since the old tutorial taught only 20% of what the player needed to know about the game, I thought it would be a good idea if the new tutorial would teach users 100% of what is in the project.

I thought, “Damn, people should like that there are all these missions here!“. Maybe it will be something like a classic video game fan for opening the maximum number of levels. In general, I thought that 31 missions in this regard is a winning moment.

It didn’t occur to me that 31 training missions would be perceived as something unaffordable by those who are telling me about it now.

Another thing I didn’t take into account was that people can stop going through the tutorials (or not at all) at any time and take up the main Play Mode. I expected that many would complete at least 5-10 training missions, play in the main mode, then return to the tutorials and so on.

In reality, people were confused, they thought they had to go through the entire tutorial in order to start Play Mode. One guy wrote to me that he’s a fan of 100 Rogues, but he can’t take on Auro because there are too many rules in the game. For those who haven’t played 100 Rogues, it has 10-20 times more rules than Auro.

In the end, the story with the tutorial is like this: initially we fell short with originality, trying to sit on the maximum number of chairs, and then overdid it.

Auro Tutorial 2.0

Talking to a powerful design magician DanC one day, I heard from him one thing that touched me:

“Players will say that they are stumped by the project, that they don’t like your game when you throw them into the thick of the rules, despite the fact that after reading them, it will be much easier for them to pass the game.”

The main idea of the new changes was to give players some basics, but not to get bored with the details. Get them to take up Play Mode as early as possible.

What have we done for this?

First, we have reduced the number of training missions from 31 to 20. We combined some missions, got rid of some of them.

As an example of the level that we got rid of, I will give the one that told about the Trickster.

The trickster, if anyone does not know, does just one thing: changes places with the player. It is not directly hostile and in itself does not pose a danger to the player. There was only this opponent on the removed level. We thought that we could throw this kind of rules out of the tutorial, we could let the players figure out how to play themselves in the presence of such an opponent.

Also, for example, we have combined the first and second levels. Previously, the first taught movement, and the second taught dropping opponents into the water. But moving is such a simple and intuitive thing that, in fact, it does not require its own tutorial. Therefore, now the tutorial on dropping has become the first lesson with a small introduction on how to move in the game.

We not only reduced the number of tutorials, but also hid the last 10 until the player reaches rank 4 in Play Mode. Therefore, when users launch Auro for the first time and get to the screen with tutorials, they see:

Fortunately, this is a much less shocking sight than before. After you reach the 10th tutorial, a game character appears at the bottom, who says “Go play Play mode, come back when you reach rank 4.”

After reaching rank 4, 10 more tutorials are opened.

This made getting to know the game a lot less intimidating for people. We have also made a number of small changes, such as improving the text feed at the top of the screen to make it easier to read game messages if you missed one of them.

I also want to share with you one interesting observation.

At least one person found our project too complicated, because the game character teaching the game mentioned that there is a manual for the game. The player wrote us something in the following way: “is there a manual? Damn, this game is difficult!”. Apparently, nowadays users associate manuals with a “high level of complexity” (but even toasters have manuals!). This should be taken into account, so we have removed any mention of the manual in the dialog boxes. However, it is still available in the game. You can find it by clicking the How to play button on the home screen.

In general, we are very sorry that we could not do all this at the time of launch, but we believe that Auro will have a long life, and one month with bad tutorials will not be much for us.

This text is published with the written permission of Keith Burgun, the author of the original article and the lead designer of Dinofarm Games. By the way, he is also the author of the book Game Design Theory: A New Philosophy for Understanding Games.

A source: http://www.dinofarmgames.com