I think I can summarise my initial experiences with Dwarf Fortress quite easily: If it wasn't for the wiki, I probably would have dropped the game fairly early on.
It's been said before, and we are no doubt all aware of it, but I'll say it again anyway: The initial experience of the player more or less defines if he is going to keep playing or not. If he finds the game confusing, he's almost certainly going to put the game in his mental "Too-hard basket" and move along to something else.
With this in mind, I've decided to write about what I believe the initial experience of the player should be. Some ideas shown here have already been posted on the thread, and I'll admit that these have been more-or-less stolen from those posts. I'd love to give credit to the creators of these ideas, but I can't remember who they are. That all got mixed-up during my sleep. Anyway, on with it all.
Keep in mind that I'm not suggesting that this all needs to be in the game immediately, this release. This post is all about the long-term. And it's only my opinion, I'm not trying to say that this the only way to do things.
First of all, we must remember that quite a few people that download DF won't be computer literate. At all. These are the kind of people that have never seen a compressed file before, and have no idea what to do with a zip or rar file, or even an exe file. Now, what I'm about to say is probably going to be met with extreme prejudice, and it won't be appropriate to implement before the 1.0 release, but I'll say it anyway: The game will need an installer. With shortcuts on the desktop and in start menus. For some people, that's the only thing that they've seen before. You give them an un-zipped copy of DF as it is now, and they won't know what to do with it. So it's essential that we get people actually into the game first off.
Of course, I'm not saying that these people are the majority, but there are a fair few of them. And we have to accommodate for everyone.
Anyway, the player starts up the game, but the first thing that they see isn't the into movie. As this is the first time the game has been started, the game first asks if the player would like to go with the default ASCII, or an included, official tileset, possibly even recommending the tileset for new users. The game should also inform the player that they can switch between the two, or even install another tileset, at a later date.
Yes, I am an advocate of having an official, included, non-ASCII tileset. This may be a shock for some of you. But most people probably don't care. The points for and against an official tileset have already been stated by others, so I won't bore you by parroting them.
Then the user is hit by the awesomeness of the intro movie. Which is good, because it helps them see a little of what it's all about. Holes in mountains, dwarves, industry, war, and hidden fun stuff! Anyway, main menu appears, and half a second later so does a pop-up, welcoming the player, recommending the tutorial, which is pre-highlighted. Player presses enter, a little menu listing progressive parts of the tutorial. Perhaps the player cannot access part two without going through part one, but that's an idea for another discussion. Player chooses the first part, and a little pre-generated fort starts up. Someone suggested that most of the things (like everything from the chance of sieges down to dwarves needing food and booze) should be disabled, another said that most of the menus should be disabled and inaccessible, and yet someone else suggested only having one dwarf (I believe he suggested someone called a "prospector"). Let's discuss this.
First of all, the disabling of game features. If the player is trying to follow the tutorial, it's going to become very confusing and annoying if he is continually hampered by dwarves taking breaks, or even eating and sleeping, until such things are actually introduced by the tutorial. Until the tutorial introduces it, even things as basic as dwarven emotions should be disabled, so the fort can't possibly collapse into a tantrum spiral. Or even (especially very early on) disabling attacks On this note, perhaps introducing things through scripted events are a good idea. Like fey moods - Somewhere late in the overall tutorial, perhaps after crafts and trades, the game announces that a peasant has been taken by a classical, garden variety fey mood, which itself is actually. The tutorial pop-ups then babies the player through the process of ensuring the dwarf has the materials he needs ("Oh, it looks like he wants metal. Remember that hematite vein we saw before? Go mine some of it out, and smelt it into iron bars."), and once the artefact has been made, start covering artefacts and their use, and possibly keeping them safe from thieves.
Secondly, the disabling of menus. There's nothing worse for a new player than to be deserted by the tutorial after accidently going into some menu or mode that you don't know get out of, screaming at the screen "WHAT THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO DO!" I've been there, and it's incredibly aggravating, and every time it's happened to me in any game that I've just started learning I've tended to just kill the process and move on to something else. It has happened to me while playing DF, but usually it tended to happen after I had gotten over the learning curve, and fortunately most of the menus already tell you how to get out of them. Still, there's no point letting a new player get lost in military squad screens before that's all introduced from him.
Thirdly is the idea of cutting down the number of dwarves early in the tutorial. The main point behind this, I think, is to give the player less to think about, and less to keep track of. I mean, when you go through the first tutorial of Age of Empires, you aren't given a fifty-man army to go from point to point with. You're given four or five guys, max. You only start to see large numbers of people later, when things like formations are introduced.
Eventually, after the player has learnt most of the essentials, the game should run through genning a world, choosing an embark site, perhaps even creating an embark profile. There's no point in a player going through the entire tutorial and then getting lost on the embark screen.
Finally, after all that, it would probably be a good idea to point the player to the wiki, in case they want to know something specific (like the material value of granite), or another perspective, or even just to be part of the community.
I'm sure there are other ideas out there regarding the possibility of tutorials, and I'm sure that some of them are probably as good or even better, but this is just my interpretation of the ideas of other's and my own personal "vision".
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Topic: What turns you off about DF? (Read 314872 times)