Arcen Games
General Category => Skyward Collapse => Topic started by: tigersfan on May 06, 2013, 05:47:22 pm
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Ok, it's obvious from some of your feedback that the tutorial needs some work. So, here's our current plan for the tutorial. Aside from a pop-up or two, we want to have a box in the top right corner that gives you instructions like "Build a woodcutter." Then, if someone wants a bit more info, they can hover over that box and get more info on the tile they're being asked to build.
Currently, we have a first draft of what those instructions and text would be. I'd appreciate any feedback on this. Is this enough info? If not, where do we need more?
I'm particularly looking for feedback from the players who struggled with the tutorial (especially you, Chemical_art :) ). Would this help you?
The text of the draft is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nVGJWSLPGt1649rFX-IdXsttF6LIFheqXwTloJHMmc4/edit?usp=sharing .
Thanks!
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First pass scanning, I'll go over in more detail later, but I notice there's no mention of which buildings you may need multiple of. For instance the wood cutter/carpenter, on the wood cutter you might say, building multiple wood cutters lets you harvest more logs, but for now only build one. The carpenter might say, each village only ever needs one carpenter and it will handle that villages needs, provided there is enough raw lumber from wood cutters for it! Ditto for the other producing buildings.
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Woah, it's pretty weird watching it get edited as I'm reading it.
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First pass scanning, I'll go over in more detail later, but I notice there's no mention of which buildings you may need multiple of. For instance the wood cutter/carpenter, on the wood cutter you might say, building multiple wood cutters lets you harvest more logs, but for now only build one. The carpenter might say, each village only ever needs one carpenter and it will handle that villages needs, provided there is enough raw lumber from wood cutters for it! Ditto for the other producing buildings.
Good call. Working on this now.
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Oh, I didn't know you only ever needed one Carpenter per faction. I was building one per woodcutter. The same for the other buildings. Good to know.
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A couple notes that Chris mentioned in my resources thread (strat discussion) that might be worth mentioning in the tutorial.
- The purpose of finished goods is typically to be able to limit things on a per-town basis. If you don't want X military units in a given town, and they need pottery or whatever, then don't put a potter in that town. But you CAN put a potter in a different town.
- The raw resources are stored globally, so you don't have any faffing about with worrying about which town has access to stores of basic stuff. The duality of these two things give you control without tedium, essentially.
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Oh, I didn't know you only ever needed one Carpenter per faction. I was building one per woodcutter. The same for the other buildings. Good to know.
I think it's per town (or Town Center) rather than per faction.
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Oh, I didn't know you only ever needed one Carpenter per faction. I was building one per woodcutter. The same for the other buildings. Good to know.
I think it's per town (or Town Center) rather than per faction.
Yes, it's per TC.
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So far so good.
I say so far.because i havent gotten any further then this.
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This must be placed at least two squares away from the town center.
I think it should say "at least three squares away" since when I see at least two, I think two and above.
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So far so good.
I say so far.because i havent gotten any further then this.
Well, are you saying you want more? If so, exactly what more do you want? The idea behind the game is that there isn't going to be just one best way to play, so it's a bit hard to hand-hold through an entire game. My thought was that this would pretty much be the end of the tutorial, with the possible exception of trying to find a way to explain trade.
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This must be placed at least two squares away from the town center.
I think it should say "at least three squares away" since when I see at least two, I think two and above.
Fair enough... Fixed.
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What i.mean is. that to explain things like intentionally.not.giving a resource so it wont produce a unit. or when and how to use monsters or gods. these are key features to games it would seem and need to be explained.
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Well, tihs is definitely more clear then the previous one...still going through it myself, but it feels much more like a "tutorial" now as it goes into much more detail on what the buildings are, do, and what you should be focusing on.
*EDIT* just got through it all, and all I can say is...WOW, a lot more clear now. I had a general idea of what each building did and what was required, but it helped to lay it out in a much easier to understand format.
Overall much more impressed with this one, then the previous one.
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What i.mean is. that to explain things like intentionally.not.giving a resource so it wont produce a unit. or when and how to use monsters or gods. these are key features to games it would seem and need to be explained.
Ok, fair enough. I'm not sure of the best way to do all that yet, but I'll think on it. In the mean time, I've included a blurb in the first part about gods not appearing till later in the game.
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Box text: Build a butcher.
Hover text: This is where logs are cut into lunber. Lumber is used to make military units, to make/upgrade buildings as well as other things. Each town only ever needs one butcherr and it will handle that town's needs, provided there is enough pigs and/or sheep from farms for it! This must be placed no more than two squares away from the town center.
Is that where Bacon comes from? /shudder
I fixed a few errors and tried to tidy it up a bit. I also made a few changes that I thought would help the player. Of course, others may feel free to offer suggestions on this.
Box text: Build a Butcher.
Hover text: This is where Pigs are made into Bacon--obviously the best resource--and Sheep is made into Mutton. Bacon/Mutton are used to make military units, as well as other things. Each town only ever needs one Butcher: as long as you have enough Pigs/Sheep, the Butcher can meet the needs of every building in the town. This building must be placed within two squares away from the Town Center (including diagonally).
I'll go through the entire document after dinner; it'll take me a little bit of time to give the same treatment to the other categories. Overall, I think it shows a good overview of the various resources. I may add a bit more to the end of it, to explain a few other important notes for the player (gameplay mechanics such as movement and attack, pickup items, building destruction, etc).
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Nice concept, I would personally encourage the player to learn theirselves what to build(For example, not instructing the players to build specefic units/resource production tiles specifically but learn them what they have to build by instructing them to build the items stated in the tooltip that are required to build units :)
Give a person a fish and feed them for a day, give them a rod and teach to how to fish and feed them for a lifetime.
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Is it at all possible to make the boxes of what to build clickable, to give the player an indication of where that is in the menu? Or, maybe add a short little description on where to navigate to find said option? I was kind of able to figure out what buildings I needed, but sometimes I couldn't actually find them in the menu on the left side. I would suggest to just allow clicking on the tutorial to enter placement mode, but that wouldn't teach anybody a darn thing.
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One thing:
Even after a bunch of time with the game, I'm *still* honestly not sure just how population actually works, or what it does. No idea at all. I look at the population counts, and it's like.... yeah, those sure are numbers, all right.
Better explanation of that aspect would help.
Also, give the players some examples of what Smite can do in relation to these buildings. Like, if you want to halt the barracks producing units for a time, you can simply Smite the butcher, which'll put a hold on it. Or even smite the barracks itself. Very useful thing, smite. I've found it to be very versatile.
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OK, it's going to take me a little bit longer to rework this. I'm going to try to incorporate iozay's suggestion (below), by guiding the player through how the placement and resource system work. I think the tutorial should also cover the basic mechanics of the action stage (even though the player has only minimal control over that phase).
Nice concept, I would personally encourage the player to learn theirselves what to build(For example, not instructing the players to build specefic units/resource production tiles specifically but learn them what they have to build by instructing them to build the items stated in the tooltip that are required to build units :)
Give a person a fish and feed them for a day, give them a rod and teach to how to fish and feed them for a lifetime.
Edit: here's what I have so far. I've included formatted and plain text (just in case) in the attachments. I haven't gotten to unit actions yet, but I think that should be covered. In fact, I can't help but think that the tutorial should almost be split off from the main game, similar to AI War (if that isn't feasible, I have a workaround). Let me know how that looks--especially if you had trouble with the first tutorial.
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One thing I'm really not clear on, even after a couple games, is how the Chapmen work. Are resources added immediately when a Chapman goes to a resource square, or do they have to "ferry" them back to town? Do they have to pick up all non "On-demand" resources?
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As far as I've picked up, they need to pick up all the raw resources and carry them back to -any- of the town buildings (not necessarily the one for that resource). If you look at the chapman info, it shows a carrying capacity, and also makes it look like as they get more encumbered their movement goes down.
They also can't pass through friendly units, so its really possible to overplace your chapman and be unable to effectively get any resources.
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Okay, so the tutorial definitely tells you what to do better now.
I'm ambivalent on whether it explains the WHY portion, but that is because I think I already understand it.
I think there should be a note at the end of the Norse portion that the Greeks have slightly different needs, and suggest to the player that they should check the tooltips before placing buildings.
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Definitely better now!
There seems to be a typo here, though (marked as bold):
Box text: Build a Smelter.
Hover text: The smelter takes iron from the mines, and makes it into steel. Steel is used primarily in some of the more advanced buildings. Each town only ever needs one smithy and it will handle that town's needs, provided there is enough iron from iron mines for it! This must be placed no more than two squares away from the town center.
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As it is, some players will hit a roadblock after the end of this tutorial.
There are some deeper mechanics that could be explained later such as:
- God tokens, this should happen just before/after round-2.
- How exactly can they stock up on manufactured resources like cut-stone, bread, and jewelry. There are plenty of situations where you end up with 60 rocks and 0 cut-stones or 80 wheat and no bread (http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=11366) - and nothing tells you as to why. You can't tell whether it is because your chapmen need to be on the tile to make them, or that they only trigger once per turn, or... What is On-Demand when nothing in town is demanding them?!
Things like that you can deduce from experienced, but I doubts new players will have patience with them and will just run Cornucopia constantly. Speaking of which (http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=11367)...
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Tutorial doesn't really explain edicts.
Yeah, that's about it.
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Oh, I didn't know you only ever needed one Carpenter per faction. I was building one per woodcutter. The same for the other buildings. Good to know.
This is one pretty annoying aspect. Actually, I'd suggest either making it impossible to place duplicates in a town, or changing the tooltip of the town center to show the buildings there (with resources being moved to an external panel. There's really no reason to put global resources in an annoying corner).
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Oh, I didn't know you only ever needed one Carpenter per faction. I was building one per woodcutter. The same for the other buildings. Good to know.
This is one pretty annoying aspect. Actually, I'd suggest either making it impossible to place duplicates in a town, or changing the tooltip of the town center to show the buildings there (with resources being moved to an external panel. There's really no reason to put global resources in an annoying corner).
I think most of the time you don't want duplicates in a town, but sometimes you *might* want a backup, so I don't know if I'd do away with it completely.
I think the best option is when you have a building selected to place down, highlight all the buildings of that type green or something on the map, so you can easily see which towns have one and which don't (also it would be nice to have a green box for town buildings to show where they can be place, or a red box around towns if you are placing a resource building so you can easily see where they CAN'T be placed).
Also, maybe highlight the buildings that feed that building, so if you are placing a carpenter, have all the woodcutters be .. I dunno, purple or something.
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OK, it's going to take me a little bit longer to rework this. I'm going to try to incorporate iozay's suggestion (below), by guiding the player through how the placement and resource system work. I think the tutorial should also cover the basic mechanics of the action stage (even though the player has only minimal control over that phase).
Nice concept, I would personally encourage the player to learn theirselves what to build(For example, not instructing the players to build specefic units/resource production tiles specifically but learn them what they have to build by instructing them to build the items stated in the tooltip that are required to build units :)
Give a person a fish and feed them for a day, give them a rod and teach to how to fish and feed them for a lifetime.
Edit: here's what I have so far. I've included formatted and plain text (just in case) in the attachments. I haven't gotten to unit actions yet, but I think that should be covered. In fact, I can't help but think that the tutorial should almost be split off from the main game, similar to AI War (if that isn't feasible, I have a workaround). Let me know how that looks--especially if you had trouble with the first tutorial.
Thanks a bunch!
I pretty much took yours word for word now.
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This has been changed to reflect some of the changes being made to the game (like the removal of chapmen). I've also managed to find a way to get mythological creature deployment in there, as well as gods. :)
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I'm glad it helped! I want to add in a few more popups to explain how troop placement and combat work, etc. Should be finished sometime tonight (assuming some other work and, of course, playing Skyward Collapse don't get in the way ;)).
Edit: OK, here's the revision. Well, I actually didn't revise anything so much as add on to the end of it. I marked it with *Continued* where I left off from before.
I originally thought that the tutorial should be split off from the main game, but I understand that it would be difficult on Arcen's development time to set up a separate tutorial. As such, my thought is to indicate to the players what is happening the first time that something happens in the game--everything from movement to selecting a Lesser God. In most cases, I deemed explaining to the player after the fact to be sufficient. However, for selecting gods and placing mythological tokens, I think the user should be warned beforehand, if possible. I also had to add a few comments about things I was uncertain of, especially building capture. Other than that, everything should be accurate as of 0.804.
At this point, I think I have everything except Trade (difficult to quantify), Diplomacy (my diplomats keep dying...not good for peace negotiations), and Mythological creatures (I believe tigersfan has that one in mind already). Get a look, and let me know what you think.
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Oh, I didn't know you only ever needed one Carpenter per faction. I was building one per woodcutter. The same for the other buildings. Good to know.
This is one pretty annoying aspect. Actually, I'd suggest either making it impossible to place duplicates in a town, or changing the tooltip of the town center to show the buildings there (with resources being moved to an external panel. There's really no reason to put global resources in an annoying corner).
Not quite...it's actually one per town you need Lumber in. It's a bit confusing, but it does give the player more control over military production. I like it that way, but it might not be compelling enough for all players.
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Oh, I didn't know you only ever needed one Carpenter per faction. I was building one per woodcutter. The same for the other buildings. Good to know.
This is one pretty annoying aspect. Actually, I'd suggest either making it impossible to place duplicates in a town, or changing the tooltip of the town center to show the buildings there (with resources being moved to an external panel. There's really no reason to put global resources in an annoying corner).
Not quite...it's actually one per town you need Lumber in. It's a bit confusing, but it does give the player more control over military production. I like it that way, but it might not be compelling enough for all players.
Aye, this. The way that production works is good in a gameplay sense, but I too found it very confusing to understand, for quite awhile. And it's an important aspect, so..... yeah.
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Oh, I didn't know you only ever needed one Carpenter per faction. I was building one per woodcutter. The same for the other buildings. Good to know.
This is one pretty annoying aspect. Actually, I'd suggest either making it impossible to place duplicates in a town, or changing the tooltip of the town center to show the buildings there (with resources being moved to an external panel. There's really no reason to put global resources in an annoying corner).
Not quite...it's actually one per town you need Lumber in. It's a bit confusing, but it does give the player more control over military production. I like it that way, but it might not be compelling enough for all players.
Aye, this. The way that production works is good in a gameplay sense, but I too found it very confusing to understand, for quite awhile. And it's an important aspect, so..... yeah.
It might be a bit over confusing.
In theory it allows you to choose what units you produce in given city. In practice units have overlapping requirements which means that you are forced to choose some of them anyway. Unless requirements could be tweaked a bit to be less overlapping. (I don't see use for arsonists really... and I need to trigger them to get ballistas and be at mercy of rng to decide which one gets produced)
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Oh, I didn't know you only ever needed one Carpenter per faction. I was building one per woodcutter. The same for the other buildings. Good to know.
This is one pretty annoying aspect. Actually, I'd suggest either making it impossible to place duplicates in a town, or changing the tooltip of the town center to show the buildings there (with resources being moved to an external panel. There's really no reason to put global resources in an annoying corner).
Not quite...it's actually one per town you need Lumber in. It's a bit confusing, but it does give the player more control over military production. I like it that way, but it might not be compelling enough for all players.
Aye, this. The way that production works is good in a gameplay sense, but I too found it very confusing to understand, for quite awhile. And it's an important aspect, so..... yeah.
It might be a bit over confusing.
In theory it allows you to choose what units you produce in given city. In practice units have overlapping requirements which means that you are forced to choose some of them anyway. Unless requirements could be tweaked a bit to be less overlapping. (I don't see use for arsonists really... and I need to trigger them to get ballistas and be at mercy of rng to decide which one gets produced)
Agreed on the Arsonists. I did a Mantis suggestion about this here: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=11267
A simple suggestion just to boost their base damage; right now, they simply dont do enough, particularly against buildings, to have a real impact. They also have the bizarre tendancy to like attacking other UNITS even when they're pretty much standing on enemy buildings.
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Ok, the tutorial text is updated yet again to reflect some other changes...
* Trade and diplomacy aren't available in the first game.
* You only have 9 APs in the set-up round now.
Unless you guys think that there is something glaringly wrong with it. I think the current text is what's going in the game.
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Box text: Build a Fishery.
Hover text: This is where Fish are gathered. These resources are used to get civilians in your town. These citizens run your towns and resource buildings.
Chapmen are gone, so what is the point of these now?
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* Trade and diplomacy aren't available in the first game.
Maybe I misread something in another thread, but isn't trade going away?
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* Trade and diplomacy aren't available in the first game.
Maybe I misread something in another thread, but isn't trade going away?
Trade is not, traders are. :)
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Box text: Build a Fishery.
Hover text: This is where Fish are gathered. These resources are used to get civilians in your town. These citizens run your towns and resource buildings.
Chapmen are gone, so what is the point of these now?
Thanks, I need to update the tutorial for that part. But, they are used for mythological units/monsters now.
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Box text: Build a Fishery.
Hover text: This is where Fish are gathered. These resources are used to get civilians in your town. These citizens run your towns and resource buildings.
Chapmen are gone, so what is the point of these now?
Thanks, I need to update the tutorial for that part. But, they are used for mythological units/monsters now.
When you were doing this, I was making a mantis for this very thing ><
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Thanks, I need to update the tutorial for that part. But, they are used for mythological units/monsters now.
Looks like the <Pop up after ending Norse turn> has an error--text stops right in the middle of a word. I'm guessing you wanted to say something like, "Also, you may want to consider placing a mythological creature on the Greek side as well. Mythological creatures are normally very expensive, but they are free during the Setup round!" Or perhaps you were going to mention something about balancing out the Norse having a Light Elf (which, frankly, probably isn't necessary...Light Elves are a bit too weak right now, IMO).
I would also recommend noting that gods will automatically attack (and probably annihilate) any enemy unit that enters their attack range. However, they do not otherwise move or act on their own. That way, you avoid surprising the player by having a unit that suddenly starts tearing up enemy units.
Looks pretty good overall.
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Thanks, I need to update the tutorial for that part. But, they are used for mythological units/monsters now.
Looks like the <Pop up after ending Norse turn> has an error--text stops right in the middle of a word. I'm guessing you wanted to say something like, "Also, you may want to consider placing a mythological creature on the Greek side as well. Mythological creatures are normally very expensive, but they are free during the Setup round!" Or perhaps you were going to mention something about balancing out the Norse having a Light Elf (which, frankly, probably isn't necessary...Light Elves are a bit too weak right now, IMO).
I would also recommend noting that gods will automatically attack (and probably annihilate) any enemy unit that enters their attack range. However, they do not otherwise move or act on their own. That way, you avoid surprising the player by having a unit that suddenly starts tearing up enemy units.
Looks pretty good overall.
Good call on all of that. Fixed.
Thanks.
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Presumably the version in the initial post is the latest one, so, small thing:
"<Pop up after placing the Pig Farm>
There’s one more important thing to note about raw resources: most of them must be converted in order to be **use**."
used
or
of any use
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Presumably the version in the initial post is the latest one, so, small thing:
"<Pop up after placing the Pig Farm>
There’s one more important thing to note about raw resources: most of them must be converted in order to be **use**."
used
or
of any use
Thanks. Fixed. :)