Players don't understand game mechanics

Hi guys!
I've just released my first game on Greenlight - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=774713517
And i received few feedbacks that player can't get what to do in the game.
Web demo - http://www.konstructors.com/wayout_demo.html

Any thoughts/recommendations? Thanks!

 

Just glancing at it I don't really understand either. Have you thought about explaining it?

 

The days seem to be long gone when a player started a new game and expected to figure out what to do and how best to do it. These days they don't seem to try much at all. There are exceptions of course but I've noticed even I spend less time testing and exploring a new game than I used to despite still playing lots of classic games some for the first time where you have to do that.

I think it is because so many games for the past decade or so have become ridiculous about telling you everything. "Move by pressing left and right". "Jump over the spike filled holes". Etc.

And for a puzzle game (like yours appears to be) I think it is most likely even more important to spell everything out. Make it crystal clear what the game is about, how to play and how to "win".

 

I would say it's mostly an issue of not teaching new mechanics in an isolated enough way to ensure the mechanic was taught fully. Part of this is because the levels aren't structured well enough, and part of this is that these mechanics are too easy to randomly solve.

 

Just to be clear... the goal is getting rid of all the color on the field or making only color on the field?

 

Games of old only had a small number of inputs for the player to try. Good games made sure their opening levels limited the choices the player needed to make so that after a couple of button presses they had an idea of what had to happen. Take Super Mario Bros on NES. You can only move to the right and all of the first few things you learn straight away are the core fundamentals to the game.

In a world of mouse control, keyboards and controllers with a million buttons (i might be exaggerating), players have too many options to just be left to figure it all out. Players need a combination of good visual design and some text prompts to set out the goals, the controls and the initial path.

 

But at the same rate, control schemes are usually similar between games that share genres, or even across genres (WASD to move, space to jump, ctrl to crouch, shift to sprint. Heck, even "click character to select, click here to move them" for some types.) so are tutorials that cover those basics really necessary? There's always the tutorial mission/level/quest that has you go through these, and the more games you play the more it annoys you.
But you do have a point. Say, for example, dodge rolling, or wall climbing. Those aren't common and should indeed be covered in a tutorial.

 

The answer to your question whether the basics are necessary is 'Maybe'. It depends on the game and the intended audience but i like to use the idea that any game could be someones first game. That doesn't mean everything needs to spelled out like they are 5 years old but it doesn't hurt to remove all doubt from new players by paying attention to the first things they see UI wise, looking at what the first level expects from them and what guidance you give them for that first level. If your first level is a long hall with only 1 path to take, you need less tutorials than if you an open world like GTA. If you are a puzzle game, no one is going to figure out the goal unless told or there is only a couple of possible moves.

 

I don't think the controls really influence it much. I mean for me they don't. Once I know what the controls actually are. It's just that I used to spend a lot more time fully exploring every nook & cranny of a game world even a 2D platformer. For multiple reasons. As a gamer I wanted to see if there were secrets to find and often we just had to figure out what to do next/how to proceed. It's like the games had a puzzle element aspect to them even if they were absolutely not meant to be that way. Plus as a gamer & dev I wanted to test the game world just to see what all I could & couldn't do, what happened when I did this? What are the limitations to it? How interactive is it?

It's only been this year that I find I am not doing that nearly as much. And it might just be due to a lack of time OR maybe I just tired of checking for things hoping to find something and there never being anything. I suppose there are some Indie games that have such stuff in them but doesn't seem to be a common thing.

 

The controls very much influence it. Its great when you play a game with a familer control scheme whose game mechanics mirror what you have already played. There are 2 problems here:
1. Every game is someones first game (or first of this genre). Some game has to teach the basic mechanics so each game has the responsibility to do this.
2. Even if you've played a game like this before there are always things about this game that players need to know. Don't assume you know what players already know.

Other factors to consider is that not every game is a 2d platformer. What non-standard buttons does your game have? Do you rely on a mouse driven interface? Does your user feel they have to click on things to make things happen? The more control options a player sees, the more combinations a player has to try and the exponentially difficult it can feel. Again with Mario you simply had 4 directions and 2 buttons. Trying everything felt easy.

Tutorials don't need to be pop ups of text either. Level design can teach the bulk to players. Imagine a puzzle game with no instructions and only 3 possible moves to make. The player can learn many things while on the training wheels. As the game progresses the levels get more complex and seamlessly the tutorial ends and the game starts and player never knew it was anything else.

 

I think maybe we're talking about two different things here. You seem to be talking about game design in general, like game design theory, level design and such. I was saying that for me the controls had nothing to do with it. The controls are pretty easy to figure out generally and often even configurable. That's not why I was exploring the stages and testing this and that.

I agree about level design introducing mechanics and so forth. Just saying it seems like completely different to what I was writing. Level design is certainly important for introducing mechanics and teaching the player how to play. But there were and still are many games that do not do that. It used to be you basically "just figured it out".

 

Level design and tutorials go hand in hand though. You could print to screen pages of text, or you could show someone how to play using well designed tutorial levels with text prompts. You could make separate tutorial levels or make your starting levels act like a tutorial without the player realizing it. The reason i bring up Super Mario Bros is that the first level is designed as a tutorial but most players never realise they are being trained.

What i also wanted to point out about controls is that "Figuring it out" doesn't always make sense for every game because its harder to figure out how to play when there are many different immediate options. You can figure out Super Mario Bros in 5 seconds because your options are limited. Can you say the same for Civilization? No because you have what feels like unlimited moves. Have a look at the controls and options you have from the first moments of the game, you have a bunch of menus and can move your settler in all directions. Plus its clear that settling just anywhere isn't optimal.

In short, Its all related and the pieces that are put into the game affect how overt a tutorial is required.

 

It was not immediately obvious to me what the goal was or what the rules were. On Greenlight, most people won't stick around very long. You want to show potential Greenlight voters something awesome during the first few seconds. Eventually, I did figure out the goal and rules, but it took longer than what the average Greenlight voter will stick around for.

 

I thought it was pretty easy to figure out from the Steam animation. Played the web demo for a moment just to confirm that. About the only thing I felt was missing was some kind of indication of "par" -- how many moves it should take to clear the level. Score it like golf so I know whether or not I'm doing well.

Still, a few seconds on a splash screen with "push a colored button to invert all adjacent buttons" and maybe an animation or two with some mouse-click indications would go a long way towards addressing the complaint.

I'm surprised people couldn't figure it out, though.

 

I think probably most people are just hitting that link looking at it for 1 second at most and leaving. At least that is what I did. Just wanted to see what kind of game it was and what that very first impression was. When I flicked over it (the gif anim) looked visually interesting as I recall and was just a tiny grid of "buttons" being pressed / depressed.

Intended to go back and check it properly but never did. And now I will need to do that this evening.

Interestingly, if he hadn't put that gif animation on the page I would have spent a little more time reading about the game and probably watching the video. I immediately noticed the gif and thought looks nice, buttons up and down. Okay.

 

While game is simple to me, but that's only because I've played so many of them that I know where to look.
Problems I see with video/gifs:
1. You don't see what was clicked. Making some sort of small "splash" on screen (even if it's video/gif editing) or showing mouse clicking (if using cursor, it needs click animation) would've helped.
2. From three gifs in description, middle gif makes a move that I still don't understand what happened there and what that plus does. Pushes all buttons around in in all directions including diagonals? Propagates push further?
3. Maybe you needed to add a texts on first level "click squares!" "White is good, red is bad!" just for those, who don't understand what you can do in games, hate clicking randomly, ask questions before doing anything (I know at least a lot of such people) as a final method of hand holding?

Otherwise, demo has nice "tutorial" levels where if you ever looked at screen (some people don't do that when playing puzzles) you'd understand all mechanics, so people who say something about level design helping tutorials above just didn't play it.

 

Okay, finally checked out the Webplayer. I thought I knew what the goal was. But I never (very rarely) play puzzle games like this so despite clicking and clicking I was not able to clear the first level.

I think probably what is going on is when people are saying they don't understand what to do... I think they may not mean they don't understand the goal. Rather they don't understand how to do it.

Because I ran into the same problem. I clicked and clicked experimenting to see how the blocks reacted when clicked on but could not see any way to reach the goal. That's when I started thinking well maybe I don't really understand what the point is and watched the video.

So... maybe either make the first level much easier so a person can more easily understand how the interactions work (to me it seemed almost random-like at times). Again though it's not my kind of game so take all of this with a grain of sand.

 

never heard of it, and it's the only description you seem to give in the text at least.

 

I think the problem is 45 degrees isometric which makes the pattern hard to discern. If you made it top down it might be more understandable.

 

I had no clue from the video. What I got was you click things to make other things change colour. I had no idea what colour things were supposed to go. Or why clicking on one block changed the colour of a random sequence of other blocks.

Remember, this is not a match 3 game. You can't assume players already know the rules.

 

On the other hand, I have no idea what a match 3 game is.

 

Match 3 games are those games were you make a 'move' to change the position of two icons on the game board. A valid move is one that by switching the two icons, the switch will result in 3 or more of the same icons lining up. Doing so causes flashy effects to occur visually and then those icons should disappear. The board should reconfigure to fill in the holes created by the now missing icons.

I wrote that suitably vague as the hook of any Match 3 game is the motif of what those Icons are, what the constraints are on how you switch icons, and how the board reconfigures after the icons are removed. Some notable games in this category are Bejeweled and Candy Crush.

 

Its worth noting that even as common as match 3 games are, they all tend to start off with a really basic tutorial to show players what's happening. So even with very common game types, tutorials are still important.

 

Ah, somehow missed they had a generic name. I don't pay much attention to mobile. I just thought of all of them as Bejeweled knockoffs. Thanks.