Nightinggale
Deity
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2009
- Messages
- 5,282
Once in a while when new ideas are being discussed, people go "this should be in the colopedia". Well yes, but honestly how many of you get a new game and the first thing you do is to read through all the pages in whatever pedia the game has?
We have two issues in this regard:
People who haven't tried WTP before is also an issue. I would say given the age of Colonization and the vanilla reputation, we should consider this towards people who never tried Colonization before. In fact we have players who have never played BTS, only Colonization. It's not unreasonable to assume people buy Colonization on a steam sale, see people recommending a certain mod and then try out the mod without really knowing the game.
Thinking and researching this topic, I came across a bunch of youtube videos, which are quite interesting. It's an apparently avid gamer whose wife certainly isn't a gamer and when she decided to explore what he was spending time on, he recorded her introduction to games. It ended up being quite interesting when games are played by somebody who doesn't know what other people take for granted.
Some of the results could be quite interesting for us. I will split the issue categories into the following:
How do I win this game?
This one is obvious in a lot of games. A racing game has the goal of getting to the goal first each time. The more freedom a player has, the harder it is to know without being told.
In WTP the goal is to declare independence, though there are other ways to win the game. Eliminating all other players is also obvious, but stuff like industrial victory isn't something people realize is there without being told.
What do I do now?
The end goal isn't enough. That's like starting a game in BTS and being told your goal is to build a spaceship and you go "but I'm in the stone age. How do stone age people build space ships? Should I wait for aliens to land and steal their UFOs?".
New players need some short term goals to figure out the game mechanics. The quests idea isn't bad for a tutorial, like in a tutorial game, you get a tutorial to found your first colony. Once founded, it will give you another quest, which when completed will give you another and so on.
New players need to be told how to accomplish very short term goals in order to be told the game mechanics.
How do I do that?
Once in a while the player is aware of what to do, but not how to do it. A good example would be change profession. "my lumberjack keeps producing food in the forest. How do I make him make lumber?" (real classic Colonization question). Getting started reveals a bunch of unexpected issues, which we take for granted. For instance you move units on the keypad, but what about numlock? What if it's a keypad less laptop?
Information overload
Explaining one thing and one thing is understood (hopefully). Explaining 10 things and 4 things are understood and two of them are forgotten once they become useful. In other words it's way more useful to explain one thing at a time and only explain concepts as they are being used.
This means "add concept to colopedia" will not be good enough. Colopedia should work as a reference for people to look up something, but it's not a great tool for teaching players how to get started.
Effects of randomness
The last video shows Minecraft. According to the video, you start by cutting down trees and use the wood to build a house. Due to playing on random maps, the player managed to start on a small island without any trees, hence failed to figure out that trees would be the goal on day one. We can have the same problem because each player starts within a certain distance of land, but the random maps will not promise useful land. I have managed to start next to a single plot island and then I restarted because I couldn't find anything else.
What do we do now with WTP?
It would be nice to add some form of tutorials. If we start out with "learn new stuff when you need them", then we could make a tutorial system, which adds popups on certain triggers, like entering the colony screen, entering the Europe screen, etc. Apparently RaR used to have something of that nature, but it was removed because it was really annoying. This means we need a new system for it.
I imagine remembering which tutorials have been displayed and if displayed, skip displaying the popup. This memory should be transferred between games (don't reset for each new game) and between gaming sessions. We can do that by assigning a name to each popup and save those in an xml file next to the dll file.
This system will also have the benefit of having experienced players having gone through all of the tutorials, then updating to a new version and suddenly there are more tutorials, which will pop up. However the old ones will not wake up. If nothing else, this will help to teach players about new features after they have upgraded to a new version.
Maybe add a menu of already displayed popups to allow the player to look up forgotten info. Here we can also reset the memory if the player wants all the messages ingame again.
What about completely new players?
This will not solve a bunch of the "brand new player" issues. For that we would likely need a tutorial scenario (one or more) with scenario specific events. That way the player can be walked through locating land, finding a suitable place to found a colony, build something, found another colony, set up a trade route etc. All of them being told one goal at a time with events (or event like system), which will not show up in normal games.
For this to work, we can add a tutorial flag to the scenario files. If that's the only way to set it and events can only trigger if a specific flag is set, then we will have scenario specific events.
What else?
Anything else we can do to make it easier for people to get into the game mechanics?
While I think what I wrote here would be good, ideally we would like something, which is less time consuming to implement. Particularly setting up scenario(s) to explain everything could take a while.
We have two issues in this regard:
- People who never tried WTP before
- People who upgraded from the previous version
People who haven't tried WTP before is also an issue. I would say given the age of Colonization and the vanilla reputation, we should consider this towards people who never tried Colonization before. In fact we have players who have never played BTS, only Colonization. It's not unreasonable to assume people buy Colonization on a steam sale, see people recommending a certain mod and then try out the mod without really knowing the game.
Thinking and researching this topic, I came across a bunch of youtube videos, which are quite interesting. It's an apparently avid gamer whose wife certainly isn't a gamer and when she decided to explore what he was spending time on, he recorded her introduction to games. It ended up being quite interesting when games are played by somebody who doesn't know what other people take for granted.
Spoiler :
Some of the results could be quite interesting for us. I will split the issue categories into the following:
How do I win this game?
This one is obvious in a lot of games. A racing game has the goal of getting to the goal first each time. The more freedom a player has, the harder it is to know without being told.
In WTP the goal is to declare independence, though there are other ways to win the game. Eliminating all other players is also obvious, but stuff like industrial victory isn't something people realize is there without being told.
What do I do now?
The end goal isn't enough. That's like starting a game in BTS and being told your goal is to build a spaceship and you go "but I'm in the stone age. How do stone age people build space ships? Should I wait for aliens to land and steal their UFOs?".
New players need some short term goals to figure out the game mechanics. The quests idea isn't bad for a tutorial, like in a tutorial game, you get a tutorial to found your first colony. Once founded, it will give you another quest, which when completed will give you another and so on.
New players need to be told how to accomplish very short term goals in order to be told the game mechanics.
How do I do that?
Once in a while the player is aware of what to do, but not how to do it. A good example would be change profession. "my lumberjack keeps producing food in the forest. How do I make him make lumber?" (real classic Colonization question). Getting started reveals a bunch of unexpected issues, which we take for granted. For instance you move units on the keypad, but what about numlock? What if it's a keypad less laptop?
Information overload
Explaining one thing and one thing is understood (hopefully). Explaining 10 things and 4 things are understood and two of them are forgotten once they become useful. In other words it's way more useful to explain one thing at a time and only explain concepts as they are being used.
This means "add concept to colopedia" will not be good enough. Colopedia should work as a reference for people to look up something, but it's not a great tool for teaching players how to get started.
Effects of randomness
The last video shows Minecraft. According to the video, you start by cutting down trees and use the wood to build a house. Due to playing on random maps, the player managed to start on a small island without any trees, hence failed to figure out that trees would be the goal on day one. We can have the same problem because each player starts within a certain distance of land, but the random maps will not promise useful land. I have managed to start next to a single plot island and then I restarted because I couldn't find anything else.
What do we do now with WTP?
It would be nice to add some form of tutorials. If we start out with "learn new stuff when you need them", then we could make a tutorial system, which adds popups on certain triggers, like entering the colony screen, entering the Europe screen, etc. Apparently RaR used to have something of that nature, but it was removed because it was really annoying. This means we need a new system for it.
I imagine remembering which tutorials have been displayed and if displayed, skip displaying the popup. This memory should be transferred between games (don't reset for each new game) and between gaming sessions. We can do that by assigning a name to each popup and save those in an xml file next to the dll file.
This system will also have the benefit of having experienced players having gone through all of the tutorials, then updating to a new version and suddenly there are more tutorials, which will pop up. However the old ones will not wake up. If nothing else, this will help to teach players about new features after they have upgraded to a new version.
Maybe add a menu of already displayed popups to allow the player to look up forgotten info. Here we can also reset the memory if the player wants all the messages ingame again.
What about completely new players?
This will not solve a bunch of the "brand new player" issues. For that we would likely need a tutorial scenario (one or more) with scenario specific events. That way the player can be walked through locating land, finding a suitable place to found a colony, build something, found another colony, set up a trade route etc. All of them being told one goal at a time with events (or event like system), which will not show up in normal games.
For this to work, we can add a tutorial flag to the scenario files. If that's the only way to set it and events can only trigger if a specific flag is set, then we will have scenario specific events.
What else?
Anything else we can do to make it easier for people to get into the game mechanics?
While I think what I wrote here would be good, ideally we would like something, which is less time consuming to implement. Particularly setting up scenario(s) to explain everything could take a while.
