Task: extend the game's teach & reach by turning text into play
This will make the game super localizable, as well.
This will involve the creation of whatever training levels or special scenarios are necessary to train up the symbolic elements to avoid needing to front- or over-load the player with information when first learning.
Of special note is that this flow is most relevant for new-players to increase the game's potential reach and ability to teach. Once a player has learned the symbolic systems, this change doesn't matter; it's invisible to expert players.
Quote from #45
As an "easy to say, hard to do" big one, I would suggest an overhaul which eliminates the "Learn to play" mode entirely. These should just be the first missions. Ready for my opinionated take? 😃
As a life-long gamer I found it kind of hard to immediately tell the mapping between the scenarios and the tutorials. I would ideally want to jump in feet first and learn on the ground, but I'm immediately faced with a choice I don't understand. When I regress to enter the tutorial, it's a lot of pop-up boxes that don't let me test my knowledge. There's currently a heavy weight of "tell don't play" which needs to be reversed to "play don't tell". A way that some game designers really make head-way in this space is to imagine that someone said "We need to ship this to [foreign country] next week and there's no budget to localize any text. Go." Knowing that you can't use any text, you'd start to swap out for symbols. Rendering pictorial/ideographic game prompts for any and all textual representations and slowly training on the meaning of those symbols is the means of eliminating these text prompts.
Not an easy idea, but I believe a low barrier to entry is critical for any game looking to get off the ground.
Task: extend the game's teach & reach by turning text into play
This will make the game super localizable, as well. This will involve the creation of whatever training levels or special scenarios are necessary to train up the symbolic elements to avoid needing to front- or over-load the player with information when first learning. Of special note is that this flow is most relevant for new-players to increase the game's potential reach and ability to teach. Once a player has learned the symbolic systems, this change doesn't matter; it's invisible to expert players.
Quote from #45