Recently, I released my game Kingslayer, and ran some sponsored ads on it a couple days back (if this detail is relevant i selected the widest possible audience as a test run).
However, I’ve noticed a lot of people are leaving in the first 2 minutes and not completing the tutorial, in fact only 71.1% are even completing the first step.
I’ve added a couple of things to the game’s tutorial so far (such as overhead indicators of where NPCs are and making the first real fight of the game less harsh on the player), though I feel like the tutorial is still, somehow, ineffective for a large portion of the playerbase and I have no idea what to do next.
I’d appreciate some more eyes on the tutorial to help me identify what’s wrong, if you have any idea what to do here please let me know!
I haven’t seen it, but a lot of players don’t want to go through a tutorial. I don’t understand it, but it’s a thing.
Maybe give them a choice of watching/playing the tutorial.
Also think of other games that as they get harder they just give you hints later on about attacks or abilities as you get them rather than dump a lot of information at you the first time you play.
I understand why players might not want to play through a tutorial, but I’m afraid if I don’t have them go through a tutorial they’ll miss the whole point of the game or not have any idea how to progress.
I’ll consider giving players an option to skip the tutorial, but I’m not sure it’s going to fix the problem entirely.
The amount of text is too much before any form of action. I can see a lot of players (especially the younger audience) discouraged to continue. I’ve mostly skipped through most of the dialogue. You can try to introduce the gameplay loop in less words overall.
Although you’ve added indicators, they were a bit small and required some effort to find. You could possibly add some pathing to each objective.
Following up on point 2, when you are tasked with killing the zombies I also feel that you could have a more improved objective tracking system. Consider adding UI objective guidance as well for when spawning the boss using the relic and possibly other areas.
Not related to the tutorial but I believe you can improve some of the visual effects and animations for the combat as it could help with player retainment.
This is incredibly helpful, thank you for the response! I’ll be implementing the first 3 points into the tutorial, but improving the VFX isn’t really in my budget at the moment. Either way, I’ll see how it goes and get back to this soon!
I recomend you add beams from the character to the place they should go at the start of game, its simple and effective and not that annoying if its easy to be disabled by walking out the spawn of something
As someone who avoids tutorials,
I personally like to first play the game without any knowledge of the mechanics first, if I think its enjoyable enough without any knowledge of the gameplay, I’ll then use the tutorial to help if I have any other lingering questions of the gameplay, otherwise I still ignore it .
If the tutorial is forced, I spam click through it as fast as possible.
I think its important to make sure the main parts of the gameplay are “intuitive” enough that players can roughly grasp what the game is first without actually knowing the full extent.
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