I’ve been reading, and thinking, and evaluating feedback from people about Encounter so far and I wanted to express my thoughts on a particular topic that I think can be generalized to most Flash games. In fact, I think many flash game developers deploy this tactic to keep people interested, but I haven’t invested the time in Encounter to deploy it.
The aspect I’m talking about is the Learning Curve.
Too flat and people stop playing because quite frankly, they’ve seen it all done before. There’s nothing new. Too steep and people are confused and quit because it just doesn’t make sense or they didn’t know how to play.
I’ve read this in several blogs, but in the flash game community, players are very quick to close the window, down-rate a game, or find something else if they are not immediately captivated. There must be some form of motivation to keep them enthralled and keep them playing.
There are several things with Encounter that I’ve noticed or been told:
- Only 1 player (aside from myself) played through Endurance Trials to the finish and achieved a high score. (that’s 1/700 plays)
- The controls are hard to understand.
- Watching people play, they don’t use abilities.
- I broke the number 1 rule and reason why I usually close complicated flash apps. Big. Wall. Of. Text for instructions!
Now, I have a lot of ideas to resolve some of these major issues, and I’ve had some of them planned from the beginning but in the interest of time, I pushed releases without them, so it’s time to start looking at them.
Teaching Players How To Play
So how do we teach a new player how to play a game?
As I mentioned before, one of the biggest peeves I have with flash games, is getting hit with huge amount of text that I have to read to learn how to play. I am a hands on learner, so I like to play with things I’m trying to learn. I also think pictures are worth 1000 words (to be cliche), so providing a visual cue would be much more beneficial to me than a wall of text that I may choose not to read.
Point #1: If you have to use text to explain the game mechanics, keep them brief or use visuals instead.
So referring back to the learning curve, the current learning curve of the released Encounters is so steep it’s like walking into a brick wall, instead of climbing a small hill. The player is immediately thrown into a scramble where they have to learn the controls, learn the mechanics, and survive the encounter at the same time. Now my initial concept was this: Let the player keep trying over and over again until they defeat the encounter. Poor design choice. This translates to frustration and immediately giving up, which you cannot afford in the flash community. The only place in gaming that this holds merit are for hardcore, dedicated fans that are familiar with the mechanics already. Consider being thrown into a new MMO with a max level character and told to survive. You know nothing about the abilities, the mechanics, or the controls for the given game, so it’s going to be very frustrating. It takes a very dedicated person to really learn all of this, just to play the game. This is simply unacceptable in the casual game community.
Point #2: Introduce concepts gradually.
So instead, a slow progression should be used to ease the curve, introducing new concepts, controls, or mechanics slowly, 1 at a time. This sounds easy, but I think the key to making this work, is to make it fun. Learning should be a fun part of the game, not a boring book to read, just to be able to play the game.
So one of the future goals for the next Encounter is to do this. Teach the player how to play the game in a fun way. Fortunately, the architecture of the game will easily support this. At this point, it’s a design problem where I have to create fun, isolated encounters to teach the player how to play the game, preparing them for the final challenge.
Point #3: Make learning fun.
I think I have a few more points to discuss, but the cold I have is slowing me down and I’m growing tired. Look for some of these new concepts to be implemented in the next release of Troll Encounter.
