Saturday, July 4, 2009

N00b Friendly


I have played a lot of browsergames lately and I find one thin red line going through almost all of them. They're often very hard to understand early on even though browser games often are quite simple when it comes to mechanics. I have seen games that say that their goal is to make their game n00b friendly, but 5-10 minutes in I still have no idea what to do. This is one of my biggest goals with this game, I MUST make it understandable for new users because I really think many games lose their users in the first 5-10 minutes. If you don't know what to do, you log out and never log in again. I know I do.


So the hardest thing with this is to have a system where old users won't get tired to see the same old help text over and over again when they try to do something, but still you need something there for the new users. The easiest way is to have some sort of step by step help but I am not sure that people actually take time to look for that or read through that sort of help. One way could be to have help text appearing if the user is new, lets say 2 days? And on day 3 the help text is gone. Maybe a combination of both?


Either way, it is important for me and something I am going to work hard on.

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