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[Lancezh]

If you come to the Bay12 Games website over Google while searching for Dwarf Fortress whats the first thing you do if you decide for whatever reason that you want to try the game ? You click on Download and want to try it. Several problems with that:

- People are rarely brought to the game with someone next to them to explain whats going on.
- Due to the current construction of Dwarf Fortress they have to go through the embark screen, meaning they have to take an action about something they havent touched yet. (Its like having to decide what ticket you need for transportation before you know where to go)
- People can't know that there is no tutorial incorporated
- People can't know there are terrific Video and written Tutorials that help you get past the frustration initially much better
- People dont know beforehand that there are Tilesets who can give you an idea on what the game is. (I had a hard time understanding that as well, took me a while to understand that we're looking from up top rather than from the side)

_{For any semi-troll that's coming in here and lament on what a tough internetgangster he is for using the vanilla tileset and therefor thats the only way to do it: theres a small x on the top right of this threadwindow, its an adamantium scimitar, click it!}


Solution:

- Deliver at least a standard save without having to create a world first. Standard Embark, so they can click on "Start Playing"

- Use the efforts from the community and place a Note for new users before they download:
"Dwarf Fortress can be quite hard to figure out first, you may want to consider to check out this great ressources by the community before getting started"
[Link to Lazy Newb Pack Thread]

Oppinions ?

[Karakzon]

sounds good to me.

link them to the dwarf fortress wikki as well and tell them to have it up with the game. so they can reference.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

The readme indicates to the player that a large amount of information can be found at the wiki.

Now this might just show my age but I read the readme the first time I played Dwarf Fortress. Apparently a lot of people don't?

Personally at this stage I don't see the tilesets giving an extreme advatange to a starting player. The way the game handles graphics usually means that the graphics are small, repeated and with the massive amount of different creatures in the game still pretty ambiguous.

[Lancezh]

The readme indicates to the player that a large amount of information can be found at the wiki.

Now this might just show my age but I read the readme the first time I played Dwarf Fortress. Apparently a lot of people don't?

Personally at this stage I don't see the tilesets giving an extreme advatange to a starting player. The way the game handles graphics usually means that the graphics are small, repeated and with the massive amount of different creatures in the game still pretty ambiguous.

You highlight 2 extremly important points...

I personally didnt read the Readme, i didnt even know it exists. This might be because i expect that programms have some sort of inprogram guidance that keeps me from struggling. This expectation is understandable i think but in this case wrong.

Exactly, at your stage it doesnt help anymore. But the problem we have here is that we simply dont know how it is to dont know the game. This newbie centered view is lacking in us. Usability Design or better said, GOOD usability design builds upon stuff that people know. Of course you could write the whole game in a language that the people first have to learn, but using pictures of stuff that we can relate to WITHOUT having played the game yet is nothing more but a help to access the game.

There's a very interesting article about someone who never used a computer in his life, and he was given the task to search for a restaurant, this is a good example between what we expect people to do and what they actually relate to when accessing something they dont know:

http://jboriss.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/user-testing-in-the-wild-joes-first-computer-encounter/

[ed boy]

Also, you shouldn't immediately think that tilesets help people understand what's going on. Since letters are used for multiple things, I would find that some of the game screens became more confusing, as lots of things were automatically out of place. For example, I would be trying to choose an embark spot, and the screen would have lots of pictures of furniture on it, or I might be trying to read some text, but it had no discernable punctuation. I find it harder to play with a tileset than with ascii.

[Capntastic]

While making DF more easy for its core fanbase to use is a great idea, I don't think DF will ever attain a mainstream level of accessibility.  Part of this niche it has grown in, however dank and untouched by most normal folk it is, is why it has thrived so well in its environment.  While ideally everything should cater to everyone, DF isn't going to do that anytime soon.

As for helping the sort of people who know what they're getting into come to grips with the game, the wiki does a fair good job, there are hundreds of tutorials on youtube, and Toady has mentioned a tutorial mode in the dev notes.  He knows it's a hard game to tackle, this is not new information.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

I also agree with most of your points and what I ment by "at this stage" was the stage that the current graphic support was up to.

The ingame tutorial is a joke, we all know that. Though without a proper tutorial there isn't much else Toady can do.
The game already references the magma wiki quite a few times. Even on the first page of the "help screen". One could have the screen flash saying READ THE WIKI every few seconds and people would still ignore it.

There is a development core that states theres going to be a full tutorial makeover but untill that the best we have is the wiki which links to other more indepth guides. 

It also makes sense for Toady not to make his own tutorial. The game still has a lot of features to go and the majority of the stuff in the game are just placeholders. Rewriting the tutorial every update would get a bit old.

I'd be really blunt, it's an alpha and you don't really want to be getting the whole mainstrem auidence in here yet. Not because it's all hipster but because it's frustrating and lacking the features of a polished game.

Edit: ninja'd

[Lancezh]

It fascinates me how people continously deny the help of a tileset. To be frank without a tileset i wouldnt have had the patience to learn the game and thus experience ANY depth of the game.

I'm not talking about any new content here, what i'm saying is to point people at the right place. Community Ressources and the DF Wiki namely. I personally didnt find out about the wiki until i searched something in google and it popped up.

I cant recall any ingame reference to it other than the one i had from watching a tutorial from DJ Fogey.

To use this as an argument so the game does not get TO popular... well i'm speechless lol 

[Gatleos]

Where would we start when pointing people to the right place? Almost everybody goes to the main DF page before they end up here, so there's not much we can do.

[Capntastic]

Well the game points you at the wiki when you go to gen a world so I don't know what you mean about the game not pointing people at the wiki.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Seem to be misunderstanding a few points here.
We never said that titlesets aren't helpful for some people but if you take out the human factor of "eww ascii" there isn't much argument that either the titleset or "ascii" is better thanks to the way the game handles graphics.

I also never stated that it was so the game doesn't get too popular. I was saying that theres no point trying to cater for people who can't read the readme when it's still in alpha.
Whenever I beta test anything I read the creator's information about the product, theres surely going to be a hell of a lot of problems for myself to wade through.

Why attract players who are expecting a game when you need to attract play testers?

[Lancezh]

Where would we start when pointing people to the right place? Almost everybody goes to the main DF page before they end up here, so there's not much we can do.

You're right, its actually directed to Toady, as suggested in my op post. There should be at least a link to the community ressources close to the downloads.

[Lancezh]

I consider myself a play tester but i just approach a beta or alpha test completely different as you for instance. Where do you draw the line between player and tester ? I enjoy the game BIG time yet i gladly post any suggestions for improvement in any possible way. Like this.

[Capntastic]

The top bar on the main download page links to both the forums and the "LINKS" page which has the wiki.  They're about two inches away from the download link.

[ed boy]

It fascinates me how people continously deny the help of a tileset. To be frank without a tileset i wouldnt have had the patience to learn the game and thus experience ANY depth of the game.

I'm not denying the fact that other people much prefer tilesets, and a significant portion of players would be not playing without them. I was objecting because the proposal involved sending people straight to the lazy newb pack, which I understand comes with a tileset. I would much prefer the proposal feature an explanation of the difference, and a link to downloads with with and without tilesets.