You can’t underestimate everyone
Here is a quick list of features in inkle games which we failed to tutorialise or remind players of enough. The data is empirically backed up by how regularly we see this specific confusion or complain.
Heaven’s Vault
https://store.steampowered.com/app/774201/Heavens_Vault/
Players didn’t realise that: you can walk and talk at the same time. You don’t need to stand in one place to talk. The walk speed is fairly slow, to allow you time to have a conversation as you go. You definitely don’t need to exhaust the conversation options — which are designed to keep going, throughout the entire twenty-hour game, adapting to what you’ve recently seen and discovered.
Regularity: no one emails about this, because they don’t get stuck. We’ve seen streamers do it about thirty to forty times.
80 Days
https://store.steampowered.com/app/381780/80_Days/
Players didn’t realise that: on the opening screen, where there is a line of white text say, and half a line of blue text, which is slowly flashing and ends in a “…”, and no other buttons at all, you can click on the flashing text.
Regularity: we receive an email about this twice a month, for the last ten years.
Pendragon
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1240050/Pendragon_Narrative_Tactics
Players didn’t realise that: you could choose which of your pieces to move on your turn. We thought this was obvious, because the game is a “chess-like”, but because the UI resembled a tactics game, where the turn order is commonly in a rotating sequence, people stuck with whoever the UI surfaced as the next piece to play. Since this tended to default to the last person you played, they’d moved one piece around the board on their own until it was killed. This is not a good strategy.
Regularity: unknown. This game is barely streamed. One fairly major reviewer mentioned it, but shaming reviewers is uncool.
A Highland Song
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1240060/A_Highland_Song/
Players didn’t realise that: because a deer appeared to offer a music run, that wasn’t necessarily the right way to go.
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Regularity: Hard to say, but we saw a lot of streamers just going whichever direction the deer were going, whenever they saw one. Fair enough, the rhythm sections are pretty fun.
Sorcery!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/411000/Sorcery_Parts_1_and_2/
Players didn’t realise that: damage in combat is proportional to how large your attack is, not how large the opponent’s is. (i.e. how over-extended you are.)
Regularity: frequent, and it used to come on Discord a fair bit too. We do this state this explicitly at the start, and have a fairly detailed tutorial, but the tutorial is in story-text (Sorcery! has a feature that procedurally narrates the fight you have, like a games master might) and of course, people don’t read it when they’re fighting. To be fair, the Sorcery! fight system is unusual.
The Forever Labyrinth
https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/the-forever-labyrinth/WAG_QoNY4_4vOQ?hl=en
Players didn’t realise that: the game ended when the credits rolled. The game ends when you’ve rescued three lost souls from the Labyrinth, of a potential seven. After that, you can go back in to figure out the others, if you want to, but it’s frame as a “telling a story about the Labyrinth in retrospect” rather than the main plot.
Regularity: fairly frequent, on Discord: people ask, having saved all seven, what do they do now, and when does the game end? Telling them, three hours ago, is underwhelming.
And then, for a happy contrast, here are some things we managed to actually fix. (There are obviously hundreds of things like this over the years. But here are two striking ones.)
Overboard!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1546920/Overboard/
Players didn’t realise [until we hammered it home multiple times] that: they had murdered their husband.
Regularity: all our early players said, so “did I actually do it?” We added several lines of Veronica saying to herself: “I did it. I actually did. I finally got rid of him. Hallelujah! He’s gone…”, and so on. We also wrote it on the Steam capsule (“Get away with murder”), and in the description. And put it in the trailer. This worked.
Expelled!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2963890/Expelled/
Players didn’t realise [until we added an entire scene that’s entirely dedicated to teach this] that: being “bad” gives you more freedom to act.
Regularity: about half our early testers were completely stuck, because they wanted to be good people, and only do good things: but being good, when the system is entirely stacked against you, doesn’t and can’t work. We added a fairly hefty scene where the Head Mistress totally rolls into you fighting back. This worked, and the story is better for it.
In conclusion: while a lot of players will get what you’re doing, you can’t underestimate all players. Some people just aren’t paying attention at the time you need them to. The more people you want to reach, the more generous with help you need to be. And sometimes, you can still be classy about it.
