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GalCiv IV: Supernova Dev Journal #16 - The importance of onboarding

Long ago we had these things called “user manuals”. I loved reading a good user manual. I’d sit back with my copy of the Civilization manual or the Ultima IV manual and just spend a weekend afternoon reading it.

The days of manuals seem long gone. Gamers expect that the game will walk them through how to play the game and there is a real art form for doing this.

For Galactic Civilizations IV: Supernova we are adding not just in game tutorials, but the leadership assistant to help explain what a given screen does and how to use it (and it can be turned off of course).

Here’s the one we’ve added for choosing what ship to build:

…and for designing a ship:

Now, I know if I were to ask those reading this if they prefer these to user manuals, many of you would say “We prefer a user manual!”. And of course, we are going to provide one of those too. But I actually do like these screens because they allow us to keep our game from being “dumbed down” as Supernova is a pretty complicated game.

What do you think?

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These are good, but I keep getting them every single time restart the game on the same screens. Is there a way to mark them as 'read' or dismiss them? They don't show again in the same session, but after each time I restart the game.

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I think the nested tooltips are a fantastic solution enabling you to get into as much depth as you want without cluttering the UI. I like the advisors and tutorials; the only thing less than great about them is that you do lack a global (so not per-game) way of muting them once you've got your value out of them, as pixelcowboy says.

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I also remember those days trying to contain my excitement as I pored through the Ultima IV and Ultima V manuals. They were almost as fun as the game itself! Things have changed much since those days, and people expect games to 1) introduce new concepts at a reasonably digestible pace - not all at once (campaign) 2) clarify anything complex as close to the context as possible. As such, I totally agree with the idea of nested tooltips. For a game like GalCiv, with so many different places to look in UI, give me the details that I need to know while i'm looking at the thing. Also agree, need way to get those advisors to stop coming up so often.

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User manuals were great. However, they can get outdated. They're expensive. They're not earth-friendly. Once you're done reading and know a game - they wind up in my user manual closet.

But they were all we had.

Now - with advanced in AI - I think online useful tutorials and such will quickly be far better than user manuals ever were.

Whether a physical user manual or an online AI-based tutorial - it's only as useful as the information given. Sometimes tutorials are written by the game wizards because they're the experts. However, being an expert doesn't always translate into being able to effectively communicate to non-experts.

I always had the expert write the manual/help file and then have a non-expert (me) read it and see where certain points could be better clarified.

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I wholeheartedly agree with the above assessment from Valkdvdr. Experts know so much that they omit steps they feel are obvious, but if you are a new person playing, they are not obvious. This is my observation having sold technical software for 30+ years.

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Quoting KarlEngler,

reply 5

Agree when I was in the Army every once in awhile we would get a newbee who had no ability to retain what he was taught.

That is why you will see me make long answers to question in this and as Ghost88 on discord and Steam.

Found assuming someone knew something really could make an ass out of U and Me.

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One more late post: There is a niche for an assistant that helps a player improve their play; I don't think it is filled yet.

Currently, the leadership assistant focuses on the basics of running the interface and on saying what your options are. Meanwhile, the advisors give some help with tactics, but they also advocate for their particular area, so it is hard to know when to trust them.

It would be great if there were an assistant that acted like a coach, and tried to help you "improve your game". It could look at a planet and suggest what you should have built a few turns back, or point out how you screwed up adjacency. Or it could look at a battle, and point out how a few ships of another kind would have done a lot better. In my experience, the best time to learn is right after I've screwed up. That would be the time for the coach to appear and give me a better way of understanding what happened.

This kind of assistant would take some more effort to build, because it would be very contextual. One answer would be to allow the community to build them, by giving the mod interface access to the necessary information. A new player could then add a set of community built expert coaches to look over their shoulder.

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