Blog 4# Teaching the player to boat.

In this post we will go over how we ended up teaching our players the mechanics of the game. While reading this it is good to know that our goal was to have a immersive game, and we wanted the player at no point to be taken out of the game by pausing it or creating a tutorial level (ocean with borders) to break the immersion of the endless ocean.

During our playtests we one of the biggest problems were players not knowing what to do when we let them go on our infinite ocean. We knew we needed to come up with some way to tell the player how the basic controls and power ups work, And we also needed a way to explain the main objective. Where am i suppose to go on this infinite ocean as a player?

We solved this with several different approaches. First the main mechanics, getting the ship moving by changing gears, shooting the harpoon, shockwave and using the spotlight.
This we solved by having the player drive past a small tutorial on its way away from the harbor out on the sea, This was a part of the game were we needed to control the ship to only go forward and could’t allow the player to turn until the harbor was out of sight so we could despawn it. As soon as the harbor was out of sight the player got full control and eventually the tutorial text would fade away.

We also added the tutorial in the pause menu, this way the player can decide when to go and check what controls to use. And we would not have to keep finding ways to tell the player if they forget.

We first played around with having more information at the start but it felt to crowded and as we all know players will read it and then forget about it so it was cut. Our solution was to give the player the information they needed when it was relevant.
So when the player found a flare for the first time and picked it up, the game will show a small hint into what it does. The hint fades in and then out after a short while.

After the hint has been displayed it is also added to the pause menu.

But we still weren’t quite happy, during the play tests we still had players running in the opposite way of what the compass was telling them, and we got comments like “this is not how a compass works” sense the players expected the compass to always point north and not towards the “Artifacts” we wanted them to pickup.
To solve this we added voice lines to the game such as
“-what is happening to my compass”
“-It seems to be pointing towards these things”

And also some general ones for other things in the game.
“-these could be useful”
“-Im all out of oil, my light wont work until i find more”
etc.
(All voice acting also have subtitles)

We as a team are happy with the way we teach our player how the game works and what to do. however we still have problems with people not listening to the voice acting and not following the compass this is something i wish we had more time looking into and making clearer for the player what to do.

Thanks for reading!

About Vidar Grönros

2017 Project Management

View all posts by Vidar Grönros →