Onboarding pt.1
Inspiration
Now a very important part of any game these days especially when considering the multiplayer games is the onboarding segments, which can be hard to implement. The reason for this is players in the modern day just want to get stuck in the game and play not following any tutorials, almost as if tutorial is a taboo word never to be mentioned again.
But it is important, even myself I’ve noticed I just want to get stuck into the game without having to deal with it, or at least having the illusion that I’m not in a tutorial. For the inspiration I went for was considering the game Overwatch which is a massively successful FPS game. Now FPS and Puzzle games are different but in this case for both games the players have unique skills that they can use so I remember when playing Overwatch for the first time, even though it was a Multiplayer game, I was forced into a tutorial which did help me play the game. So I thought why not create some onboarding levels for each of the characters, but it was important not make them exceptionally long which would defeat the purpose of ‘pick-up and play’
Flow Diagram
So when I started thinking about these levels I needed to understand the context of how our characters for the game would play, now I know that both Rangers play effectively the same but the only major difference they have is how they interact with the world. On the other hand, the Alien character has a completely different set of rules because of the asymmetric design of the game so what did I need to take into account:
Ranger 1 can teleport through walls and over small gaps
Ranger 2 can move object around the environment with highlighted objects because he is a telepath
Alien has different movement and 5 different abilities
So how would I showcase this? First I decided to make my understand how this will work, if I was playing the game what should happen from the player perspective so I started from the main menu and continued from there.
Each character would have their own level and the structure would be as follows:
Start at Main Menu and then forced into Ranger 1 Onboarding Level which will showcase what the Ranger characters can do, with the shooting with the enemies as well as the movement including the teleport ability which is unique to Ranger 1 and from there back to main menu.
From main menu the player will then be forced into Ranger 2 onboarding level which will showcase everything above but in a shorter instance and will show off the a basic method of using his ‘telepathy’ from there back to main menu.
From Main Menu the Alien Character will showcase the movement and go from one ability to the next explain how each of them work one after the other and then it proceed back to the main menu.
From here the Player then has the freedom to play the game how they wish to
Next Steps
From here on it’s about going over the next steps of Onboarding, being more specific will the levels, again because this is a puzzle game I would have to conduct step-by-step diagrams to understand how the player will solve the assisted puzzle and then work on the Level Designs for each of them, however I need to also focus on how this will be presented to the player. essentially how will they be ‘rail-roaded’ or ‘hand-held’ in a visual sense as well.