Permia - Duels: The struggle for a good tutorial

Designing a good tutorials for our free-to-play games has proven to be one of the most challenging game design tasks we have faced. When Permia - Duels was first released as PvP-only game, the only tutorial it had was a three page rules summary, that was shown to the player before the first match.

The next step was to create a forced tutorial, which would walk players through the rules with a series of example matches. We expected to see an improved player engagement but the results were a disappointment as described in the The great tutorial mystery - post. Clearly we failed to do very good job with the tutorial.

After that we concentrated on working with Pet Shows and apply the lessons learned for the tutorial there (Tackling the tutorial mystery). Making the tutorial less forced by slicing it into smaller pieces was a clear improvement. Additionally we made some of the game content to unlock while player progresses instead of everything being accessible from the start and added new achievements to reward the player for progressing and giving objectives. Naturally we wanted to bring these elements also to the Duels tutorial. 

After getting back to developing Duels we started the planning of adding a story driven single player campaign to the game. In the process, the old tutorial was thrown away and the tutorial was integrated into the campaign. The PvP game mode is now locked at the beginning, and new players start by playing the campaign. The instructions are given as tips in the first campaign matches, without a forced tutorial. Players start with only a single unit and the first task is to collect a full deck of units by defeating the initial tutorial campaign matches, after which the PvP matches unlock.

While it's impossible to analyze the effects of adding the campaign to the effects of changing the tutorial separately, their combined effect roughly doubled our retention numbers, which was of course a huge success. So clearly we did something right. Regardless, based on the feedback, we still have a lot to do with the tutorial.

Previously players complained about being forced to play the forced tutorial (and rightly so), which felt too much like tutorial. Now some players feel that we are lacking the tutorial completely and they struggle to understand how the game is meant to be played. While being non-intrusive, the tips are also easy to ignore. Even more importantly, many players fail to identify the real depth of the game at the beginning, labeling it too simple or less skill based than it really is. By making the tutorial non-intrusive and as simple as possible, we may have managed to hide the complexity of the game too well. 

Essentially we have two somewhat conflicting objectives: The first encounter with the game should be as easy and welcoming as possible, to prevent frustration for needing to learn many rules at once. On the other hand, the tutorial should convey the feeling of depth to come. A frustrated player will likely quit playing early on as well as a player who does not see enough depth to make it worth investing time into the game.

In order to help the players struggling with the rules, we could add more interactive components to the tutorial: keep the it simple and non-intrusive normally, but when a player seems to be doing poor decision and losing games, the tutorial should become more intrusive and give detailed instructions to improve the situation.

The strategic elements of Duels include the unit development system and the selection of units to the deck. At the beginning it's mostly selecting the most powerful units to the deck, but as the collection grows, the options increase and one should build a deck with units whose numbers work well together. Similarly when upgrading the units, selection of sacrificed units has an effect on the outcome and can be used to direct the process to get desired kind of units. 

On the Tactical side, understanding that it's sometimes better to concentrate on creating a good defensive position or building a trap to allow capturing many units with one move, is sometimes better than simply trying to capture units with every move, separates veteran players from the beginners. Also the starting player shapes the game a lot with the selection of the first unit and it's placement. With a wise placement, one can use a well designed deck with maximum effect. 

These are all aspects of the game, which are not obvious to a new player and not easily communicated through the normal tutorial flow. One possible way to convey the depth at the beginning could be through adding special puzzle missions, where the player is forced to play in an non-straightforward way in order to win. In addition to the tutorial tuning, we could also add new content to the game, which would create the feeling of depth in a more straightforward way, like new unit special abilities and game modes. Again with these we need to be careful not to introduce them too rapidly to overwhelm a new player, but fast enough that he will not get bored.

Tackling the tutorial mystery

One area we have been struggling with all of our games is the tutorial for new players. It's so easy to concentrate making the actual game and then add a tutorial as afterthought. When one knows the game inside out, it becomes hard to design the tutorial for players who see the game for the first time.

We are just beginning to grasp the importance of a good tutorial and all the challenges included in making one. The tutorial is the first thing a new player sees. Especially for free-to-play games, poor tutorial can easily kill even a good game. People generally hate learning rules and if the process is not fluent and fun, they simply quit and find something else to play. Optimally the tutorial feels like a natural part of the game flow and progresses by creating objectives to the player instead of a forced step by step process. The biggest challenge is that players often don't read the instructions. A good tutorial should be intuitive enough to direct the player to do right things without relying on text.

In the great tutorial mystery I was wondering why adding a tutorial to Permia - Duels did not improve our numbers. Looking back now, it's evident we did not do that good job with the tutorial: It is too long, feels forced and partly concentrates on teaching irrelevant details too early for a new player. In Pet Shows we improved by slicing the tutorial into pieces which are activated as the player progresses. Regardless, the first tutorial is too long and contains too much information by trying to teach all the mini games at once. Additionally it is lacking clear objectives.So how are we planning to solve these problems?

The answer for Pet Shows lies in understanding that the player does not need to have access to all of the mini games at once. While for a veteran player it might feel limiting to have only a couple to choose from, it's enough for first time player for whom everything is new. Locking some of the mini games at the beginning also creates natural objectives for the player to continue playing to get them unlocked. As added bonus the new flow allows easy way to add more mini games in the future. 

Another thing we have been underestimating are the achievements. By designing the flow correctly, the achievements can be powerful tools for teaching the game flow without a forced tutorial. For player they form objectives with a promise for rewards. Game instructions can be hidden inside the achievement descriptions and by fulfilling achievements players learn the game flow as a side product. Additionally the achievement rewards work as a feedback for the player for doing the right things. Conversely poorly designed achievements can distract the player and thus both the achievements and their presentation needs to be designed carefully to support the desired game flow.

So that's the plan and we have already started implementing the new tutorial flow for Pet Shows. Duels will follow later, after we finish the current graphics upgrade. I will get back to the subject later, when we know were we able to improve the new player experience for Pet Shows through these changes or not. If you have any ideas for the tutorials, please let us know!

The great tutorial mystery

When Permia - Duels was first released, we did not have time to make a proper interactive tutorial for the game. Instead we had a three-slide slideshow explaining the basics, which was shown to the players before the first game. Later the beginning was improved slightly by forcing the first three games against a really easy computer opponent and showing only one slide before each game. Despite the slight changes, we did not have a proper tutorial until now.

As we constantly have more things to do than resources to do them, prioritizing is essential. Originally the tutorial was not among the top priorities and was thus neglected this long. But lot of the feedback we received indicated that the missing tutorial was a major problem for the game. A typical player feedback would say that the game felt much more complicated at the beginning than it actually is due the missing tutorial. Many of the game business veterans we have talked, have emphasized the importance of a good tutorial. Even publishers we talked named the missing tutorial as a major flaw in the game.

So we felt a bit stupid for neglecting such an important issue for so long and decided to fix the issue. The interactive tutorial explaining the basic game play was added in the last weeks update. The tutorial is by no means complete yet, as it only explains the basic game. We still have work to do to properly explain the rest of the game, namely the card development system. But back to the issue, what is the great mystery of the tutorial then?

When we make changes and add features to the game, we try to anticipate the effects and then measure if we were successful on improving the game or not through data and feedback. In the tutorial case the assumption was clear: All the signs indicated that the first contact with the game felt too complex for the players. Many did not clearly understand what to do at the beginning, got frustrated and quit playing due to that. Each such player could have potentially liked the game and continued playing if the beginning would have been more welcoming. So we should see an increase on the percentage of new players who continue playing past the couple of first games after adding the tutorial. Or a drop,  if the tutorial was poor and players get frustrated to it.

Now we have the data from the first week of having the new tutorial. So, did we see an increase or drop? The answer is neither and that is the mystery of the tutorial. The numbers are almost exactly similar before and after the adding the tutorial. At the moment we are more than slightly surprised by the result. We were all definitely expecting an effect, some smaller some larger, but at least something.

So what can we actually learn from this? The lesson is definitely not that tutorials are unimportant. But it might be that the importance of a tutorial is somewhat dependent on the type of the game in question. Permia - Duels is a strategic collectible card game, which has a bit of a niche appeal. Maybe making the game more easily approachable is still not enough to convince players who don't like the genre to begin with, while those that do are willing to learn the game anyway with or without the tutorial. The results might be completely different for a different game though. In a broader concept, this should remind us, that each game is unique and a common wisdom that is true for most might not automatically hold for this particular case.

Of course making the tutorial has not been a wasted effort. It should make it easier for new players to get in the game make the overall player experience better. We will also be adding the missing tutorial parts in the future and believe that despite the initial numbers, having a proper tutorial will benefit the game in the long run. But all that said we are still quite puzzled by the lack of any measurable effect of adding the tutorial. So if you have an insight to the mystery of the tutorial, please let us know!

Our first mobile release

The last two years have been all about learning. Now we have encountered yet another possibility to learn when we launched our collectible card game Permia - Duels in Windows Phone store at 14 Dec 2013. After about one and a half months and almost 100 000 downloads later we have had first few small ideas what it means to publish a game in a mobile market place.

Earlier we only had experience of releasing game in a small social network Habbo hotel and it has been very much different experience.

Update delay

First of all, we cannot update the game currently whenever we want to. We have not yet implemented the feature that allows us to update the content for the game directly without going through store certification. That is something we definitely want to do in the future. Already we had an issue where Lumia black update changed the way some configuration for the viewport of the game were defined and our game was broken for all the high end devices with HD resolution. You can imagine how grateful I am for Microsoft Store certification team that handled the update in two days instead of one week just before our promotion all over the world started.  All the previous review periods were closer to that one week. Even if the certification goes as fast every time in the future it is still at least couple of days after we have the new version ready before the players can use it.

Analytics

All the data we gather from the game and feedback that we follow have helped us to react to the problems much quicker than it would have been possible without these. We have found couple of bottlenecks in our server code after the release and both times it has been the same. First active user tells that something does not work like it should. Then our ratings start to decrease. These are enough reason to start studying what is the problem. Then simple analytics that we gather from the game pinpoints the place where the problem lies. Both times we were able to fix the bottlenecks in one day after they first started to encounter. For the team that is as small as us I feel that it is amazing to react that fast.

Ratings

These seem to have power of the god. When we did not ask our players to rate us at all, we mostly got bad ratings. It seems that people remember to tell if they don't like the game or the game does not work much more often than if they like the game and we don't remind them to do that. Permia - Duels average rating was less than 4 before we implementeda "rate us" dialog in the game. We don't want to interrupt the player, but it is crucial for our game to have good ratings. Without good ratings, we don't get promotion from Microsoft. Without good ratings, players do not download the game and because our game is multiplayer game, our game cannot live without plenty of players. Everything starts from ratings. How cruel that is when you are not going to buy those ratings for you. We don't want to buy ratings so we decided to add the dialog. After we had the rate us dialog in the game our ratings have gone up to 4.4 average and still growing. We have had much more ratings than before and it has helped us to get promotion and more importantly the players as well. Yet another story is that only good rating is five stars. All the other will weight ratings in wrong direction. Average 4.3 is minimum that is expected from us.

Reviews

We had an excellent review from WPCentral. We advertised that in our Facebook and Twitter accounts. One day after that we got an excellent review from WP player ratings. We advertised that as well in our Facebook account. I was quite amazed how big difference was with the impact those messages had. The player review was seen by six times more people than the WPCentral one. With this case it seems that people are more interested about what other people say than what media says. The article in WPCentral reminded us about importance of the social media. We really have not been active enough to promote our social media sites. We have had over 1 000 000 players playing our games and we have little over 160 people that likes our Facebook page and little less than 100 people who follows our Twitter. We will test with next update if we can get little more players to follow us because social media is currently best way to notify our players what is happening.

Some final words

I have to say that we feel very welcome in Windows Phone environment. All the great feedback has given us strength and motivation to continue with the path we have taken. We are long way from the product we have in our vision. With the help of the players we will go towards that vision and continue delivering new features one by one. First couple of months we will use to make sure that everything works like it should. We create small adjustments to the game and after we are satisfied with the maturity we will start bringing new features to the game. If you have Windows Phone 8 and you have not yet downloaded the game, now is the perfect time to download it. :)