published on March 30, 2026 in devlog
In this week's devlog Michi talks about the planned changes to the new player experience.
Michi (molp)
We are currently looking into how to improve the new player experience. One point of criticism that we often hear is that the tutorial is too short and doesn't explain in detail how the game works. After the tutorial is over, it can feel like being thrown in at the deep end, with only a slight hint on how to continue from this point on.
To improve the situation, we are currently working on three things: a post-tutorial contract series, improvements to the existing tutorial and a new tutorial that takes place before the company creation.
The post-tutorial contract series continues where the existing introductory contracts from the faction officials end. The goal is to guide the player to establish a second base. We want to achieve that by offering contracts that dive a bit deeper into the game mechanics that are relevant during early game: building construction, fulfilling faction contracts, buying consumables, making money and managing the base. The final contract will provide some of the building materials for a second base. We also hope to increase the player retention by giving the players more to work with during the slower early game. The contracts have been designed by Fabian and I hope to be able to implement them soon.
Fabian is also working on a new tutorial that takes place before the founding of the company. Right now the situation is a typical chicken-egg problem: To found your first company, you have to know at least a bit about the game already to make a good decision. Over time, we changed the layout and information being displayed on the company creation screen so many times to improve this, but the underlying problem stays the same. The option to liquidate and start over with the newly acquired knowledge is there, but it has to be discovered by the players, or mentioned by other players. The community is very helpful here, but not all players want to interact with other players. The new tutorial is designed to show new players what the game is about, how the core mechanics work and what to expect. Fabian is currently researching how other browser games handle this, but given that our target audience is not a casual player, it is challenging to decide how "hand-holdy" the tutorial should be.
This week I implemented three improvements for the existing tutorial. The first one is an extra step during the first tutorial, highlighting the NOTS button in the upper right. We noticed that there are some cases where players didn't know about the notifications and got stuck. Since the post-tutorial contracts, the existing introductory contracts and the regular gameplay make heavy use of notifications, it seems like a good idea to highlight them.
The second change also has to do with notifications. The second introductory contract has a pick-up condition for some additional materials. Since the next introductory contract can only start once the previous is done, it is important that the players fulfill the pick-up condition. It is also important that they learn about these contract conditions. That is why I added a new notification that fires if the player doesn't pick up the materials, e.g. the condition becomes pending.
Finally, in the flight tutorial we mention the commodity exchange station as a good destination for a first flight. The flight screen has the station in a tile and highlights it. The tutorial states that the player should take note of the station code, as they might need it later. Once the tutorial progresses to the SFC command the player is asked to enter the code. At this point we don't show the code anymore, which is not helping.. So I implemented a change that will show the comex code. Implementing this was a bit more work than expected, since the station code is dependent on what faction the player chose and the tutorials didn't provide support for dynamic data so far. I'll deploy these changes later this week.