Proper Devlog #2

Learning is hard. Whether you are trying to acquire new skill yourself or teaching someone else. This especially relates to tutorials in games, because there is usually one mostly fixed sequence and no immediate feedback to adjust it. 

And this is the part that we apparently failed. According to approximately all sources of players feedback, understanding the game at least on the level required to beat it was not achievable. 

And that’s … completely understandable, at least now. Original plan, or at least my explanation for the first version was that all missing information was technically computable from changes in “income per turn” and after some number of attempts the player should have been able to determine everything. However, such a naive idea couldn’t work because of two major factors. Firstly, people are rarely invested for long enough, especially with such small games. Secondly, and probably more importantly, we haven’t told players what to look for, except for some vague descriptions in rules below. That clearly wasn’t enough. 

As much I don’t like tutorials, mostly because it’s difficult to make them good (here is one good video essay on this topic), we probably have to implement something tutorial-like in the next update. 

Here I would like to talk about one of our major sources of inspiration: Civilization. It’s tutorial was honestly boring, but it was a completely different experience as soon as we started a game with a couple of more experienced players and they tried to explain all the nuances to me. This minecraft-like process of learning requiring some form of social interaction is the thing that I personally want to achieve(multiplayer plans?!? probably local and later, but.../