Tutorial Planning

We’re screen-shot-2016-09-29-at-19-53-09 in the process of working on the game’s tutorial.

We’re starting a bit earlier than we did with King of Dragon Pass (since the game is not done), and we’re also taking a somewhat different approach.

King of Dragon Pass had a scripted tutorial, which tried to take you on a tour of the important elements of the game. But it was too easy to get off the rails and either miss things, or confuse the tutorial. (And as a side note, it was actually not the best first play experience since you raided during planting season — we wanted the tutorial to mention this, but if you then continued the game, you were in a small hole.)

Six Ages will take a more reactive approach. Instead of telling you to switch to the Map screen, and then describing exploration, it will wait until you switch on your own, and then describe exploration. It will also (for example) mention the size of a reasonable sacrifice the first time you’re asked to sacrifice. So you’ll get the information when it actually matters.

One thing I’d like to do is ask King of Dragon Pass players what confuses you about the game. For example, we once got a bug report that clan magic went negative. That’s actually by design, but if it confused someone, we can pop up a tutorial card when it happens. I expect we’ll have a manual too, but if something seems wrong, you’re not going to go look it up.

So please let us know what confused you or you think needs better explanation, here in the comments (or to @SixAges on Twitter).