I am looking for advice on improving my new player experience.
I made a “monster hunter tycoon” game that has a fairly asset heavy lobby. Its fast to load for returning players (10-15s) but slow for new players (90s)
New players load into the lobby and do a brief tutorial 1 minute in the lobby to get orientated in the space and then do 2 minutes on a small fast loading monster hunting map. After this they are free to play as they like.
Average playtime is a few minutes only so my new player experience is a major issue.
My organic players were averaging at 74% rating so I decided to advertise my game to try and grow it and results from my adverising have been largely negative with 6 thumbs down and dropped my rating to 56%.
The initial intro to my game or loading into my game is clearly a pain point and I need to find a way to do better for my new players.
I am thining would it be better to have a super fast loading main place (small) so that new players can practice fighting straight away and then goto the slower loading lobby from there?
Or would it be better to try other things like making the lobby load faster?
I would love to hear from other devs that had similar issues and what they did to improve the experience.
If anyone has time here is a link to the experience- any and all feedback is appreciated, thanks all!
It took me 15 seconds to notice the text box at the top, which then told me the button to the right existed.
Third, the fact that the camera is locked during the whole tutorial (and not even that descriptive on areas) makes the game quite difficult to actually understand. You’re told you’re on the main island, and your only point of reference is the AI generated slop the camera is forced to look at.
Fourth, the lack of any amount of consistency (UI, Map, Characters and even Mechanics) is horrid
(Its not hard to tell 60% of this game was AI generated and 30% of it is an asset flip and that the remaining 10% is just average low-quality beginner slop)
Fifth, the tutorial itself is pretty bad. You’re told to click buttons without being told what buttons they are. It doesn’t help that these buttons are completely unlabelled and you have to guess which one is which.
Sixth, the combat is horrible. Like outright just bad. It barely registers hits and the need to click 2 keys to do ONE attack is horrible.
Seventh, once the tutorial is done, I got completely lost. I had no idea what to do because I was (poorly) told what to do before learning how combat works instead of learning it when it was relevant to be taught.
The game itself is just bad. Visually its horrible, mechanically its horrible and with how bad the tutorial was I’m not shocked at all that players are getting lost or just leaving. First impressions were horrible and it just got worse the longer I played (which was only like 10 minutes)
Essentially, the entire game is just horrible and that’s why people aren’t staying.
I appreciate the detailed feedback, thanks for taking the time to be very structured.
I have a fair bit to work on - and I appreciate you pointing out which bits were confusing.
I like your idea to do the combat first and then explain the lobby second that makes a lot of sense and I will be taking that on board.
I dont actually have that much AI content. A voice actor did the main two characters (minor 18 characters are AI) and I made most of the monsters by hand in Blender and Krita. I have a couple of artist friends who drew all the meshes etc. All the combat icons were hand drawn.
I will look to get voice actors for minor characters as budget permits.
Backpack inventory items are AI but I will be slowly updating them over to hand drawn.
Sound effects are generic and I could get them done down the track.
I can’t reproduce the same initial issues you were having with this game. It was instant for me to notice the text box on the top, and the map was pretty cool and a unique way to present the setting, even though it looks like AI slop.
The camera is locked during the tutorial to show you the most important places. I’ve seen this done before in games, it’s not a bad way to show new players what to do, where to go, and what’s where and what’s what.
Though I will agree that for the new player navigating the map, even after the tutorial, will be an issue, because there’s no actual map of the place you’re currently in to show where you need to go, or at the very least where things are.
I’ll also agree with the UI consistency, it’s all over the place, but I suppose it’s temporary and not a final product, it’s a stand-in for proper UI when it’s finished, if it’s finished.
I’m also gonna agree with characters, the NPCs look completely different than the player characters, the player characters look like regular Roblox characters, but the NPCs look more like the humanoids Roblox is trying to push as cool and new. The mechanics aren’t bad per se, but they’re unpolished and don’t feel impactful.
All in all, this game isn’t as bad as you say it is, but it has numerous flaws that should get fixed.
The text box is not only dark and doesn’t stand out to everything else visible at that point, but it also somewhat just blends into the background. It is also worth noting im on a 27-inch monitor, so its physically further away from the center than it would be on a smaller screen, which is probably why I didn’t notice it at all.
The actual size of it may be fine, but the fact it doesn’t stand out at all and somewhat blends into the background is bad as when in peripheral vision, it isn’t noticeable.
The map barely represented what the game actually looked like and showed several locations that simply didn’t actually exist from what I saw. For a point of actual navigation, the map you’re shown was horrendous and it’d be better to just show an aerial shot of the map, but more specifically, an aerial shot of the location the tutorial is actually talking about at any given time so you can actually understand what it’s supposed to look like and where it is.
Maps are only useful when you know where you are, when you have a compass and when you know what direction is north on the map. The map shown ingame only meets one of the 3 requirements, which is showing a compass on the map itself so you can know which direction is north. Besides that, I didn’t see a compass in the game itself nor was there a marker on the map to show where I was.
Visually, the map doesn’t match the actual game map at all, its functionally useless and contains various amounts of useless information that could simply just not be there, but that information is there because AI was told to generate a map and that’s what it did.
The problem is that the camera is locked at either the useless map or showing very small snippets of POIs that you have no idea where they actually are. Yes, locked cameras can be good, but only when they’re used correctly. This game doesn’t do that.
Wouldn’t be an issue if the map actually represented where you are, what the game-world actually looked like and wasn’t AI generated slop full of useless information.
I hope most of it is temporary.
I found the combat to feel and act very, very bad.
Hit reg simply didn’t work half the time, the enemies are the basic “detection radius walk towards player and attack”, mechanic depth was very shallow (no blocking, parrying etc), and given the aiming system was removed, the entire combat system would be to spam click or hold mouse 1 (depending on implementation), which just isn’t fun.
Then there’s the lack of feedback and weight in the combat, and its just got a ton of issues, and with combat (seemingly) being one of the primary parts of the game, a system this poorly designed makes the entire experience worse.
For a comparison, it’s like if you made a rhythm game that doesn’t tell you whether you hit or missed a note, didn’t make any sound or visual notification on note hit and just made you miss half the notes for no reason.
Given my only combat experience on the game was in the tutorial, with how shallow (and poorly designed) the whole system was, I doubt it would have gotten much better.
Speaking of the tutorial, it only teaches you about a handful of mechanics. It never tells you much at all about the gameplay loop nor how the mechanics really interact with eachother. I knew combat existed and there was apparently a tycoon segment, never knew how they interacted with eachother or how to interact with either of them really.
I, as a 19 year-old, unironically had more fun playing steal a brainrot than this game.
This game was genuinely one of the worst games I’ve played this year.
The text box does stand out because it’s dark and it’s intersecting with the map that is bright. The outline is black, whereas the colors its interacting with are yellowish-green, or mixed dark blue, where depending on the touching point the contrast meets WCAG AA requirements for all three categories.
Your brain is a lot more likely to look at bright colors than dark colors, your eyes are drawn to the map, not the text. Your eyes are drawn to the useless information, not the important information.
Also reminder, the larger the screen, the more physical distance you have to look to notice something. I am using a large screen, and this makes it difficult to notice a dark text label with tiny text that only takes up less than 7% of my screen space when there is much more distracting, bright content that your eyes are immediately drawn to instead of the actually important information.
And, with no movement, audio or anything, it was quite difficult to know I was actually supposed to do anything. If I’m going to be honest, I thought it was going to be some sort of “menu” screen with a play button, and I just got confused for a second when absolutely nothing happened.
Plus, text at the top isn’t common, at all.
And again, when I saw it, it was blending into the background quite well. The top of the screen is dark, so it ended up blending in. And again, the rest of the map was bright, so that’s where I was looking.
My brain is programmed to look at things that look out of the ordinary, when a map that is bright takes most of the screen and on top of it there’s a dark box I notice it immediately because it’s unique compared to what it’s surrounded by.
The map is of the game world with all of the key locations rather than the current location (lobby)
Good point ill draw a map of the lobby and have the world map as a separate button.
The map was made with map making software there is a free version but I use the paid version since I need it for my day job. (my main job is a 3D modeller)
I agree with the UI consistency - we went for a more cartoon GUI which copped some flak for not being consistent with the world and I have started migrating to a more high fantasy style. I use the art software Krita to draw these and will have them all done by mid January.
My initial thought was wouldn’t it be cool to have roblox characters enter a new world that looks realistic. We did have custom rigs for players except people complained and said that they want to wear accessories that they paid alot of money for.
Its a tough one! I spent 2 years making all these monsters in blender so im a bit too time deep to change that.
If I made the gear more realistic would that reduce the issue?
Very good point of mechanics - we have a v3 of our combat system in production which should be out ij February.
