Starting the second Tutorial Level

After relatedly testing my first tutorial, many play testers were happy with it and understood how to play my game. They understood, how to control this ship using the mouse, how to interact with the trader ship to gain more fuel to progress in the game using particle systems of different colours. They also know how to 'Mine' a planet and what the action is, as well as know how planets in the game work and when they are full of "Mass" resources due to the pulsing coloured glow around it. Green meaning good and yellow meaning it's drained of Mass resources and is recharging.

Plan for Tutorial Level 2:

The next thing I have done is start on a second tutorial level. The idea of the next tutorial level is to show the payer the different signifiers of how much mass a planet contains. When I originally tried this I had a trader ship in the scene and a single planet to keep things simple and not over whelm the player. Also I reduced the difficulty of  the depleting mass mechanic (I disabled it for the this level) when the planet is not being mined (which I may remove because a number of play testers found it confusing how a planet drains when it's not being mined and being mined). The reason I have reduced the difficulty of the previous mechanics is so that the player has time to learn the new mechanic and not penalised too much for learning something new. This way I can explain one thing to the player at a time.

Initially at the start of the level the player is told via the intro screen, there is a planet they have to examine. Because the player should have their cargo full of planet mass, they will go to the trader initially. After this the player will go to the planet and their movement will be disabled. They will start mining the planet.

Changing the planet glowing colour:

Whilst the planet is being mined by the player, the planet's glow will change colour in different stages. Initially it will be green, then blue, purple, orange then yellow to say it's recharging it's resources. Along with this text will be above the planet, show how full of mass it is. E.g. 100%, then 75%, 50%, then 25%. This way I was trying to show the player the percentage of mass the planet has in relation to the colour it was glowing. However many players found this confusing to a degree because the wondered how the percentages were related to the glowing due to the positioning of the text above the planet.

To help with this I thought I would make the mass quantity more visual for the player. What I mean by this is, because the planet's resources are demonising, the size to the planet should also decrease as well. Even though my game is not the most realistic since some planet's are only two or three times larger than the player ship itself, I thought this might help the player work out which planet has more mass more easily and quickly.

After thinking this through, I implemented this into the tutorial level. During the tutorial level when the quantities of mass a planet has is being explained to the player, e.g, 75%, 50%, and 25%, the planet's size decreases by 25% each time. I choose this because I thought it was an obvious enough change in size for the player to see. During play testing, many players like this feature, but they still found the text above the planet confusing (I explained the percentage text will only be there in the tutorial). As well as this player's thought it would be interesting if when the planet was being mined, as well as the colour of the glowing halo around the planet changing colour, the planet should shrink in size and revert to normal when it has replenished it's resources.

After this have has been explained to the player, the warp gate appears and takes the player straight into the game.

Result:

At the moment I have stopped working on the second tutorial level because I will spend too much time on it whilst not implementing a goal into the game. Basically I'm trying to avoid doing what my group has done with our group game, and that it concentrate too much on the tutorial level and the specifics of the game, drilling down too far.

I have play tested my game on a few people to see what direction I can progress the game play in. Many people like the game so far, however I would like to play test it on more people to see how they react to it.

Ideas I may carry towards the existing mechanics:

Planet sizes:

A suggestion form a player mentioned in one of the paragraphs above. When the player is mining a planet, the size of the planet object will decrease in size gradually until the mining process has stopped. I will implement this into the game to see how people will react to it. I will have to make sure the change in size is fast enough for people to see what is happening but not too fast that the planet becomes extremely small and the model turns inside out. I will have to test this on players.

Planets glowing multiple colours:

With the planet glowing multiple colours, I may tweak this in future if people want more information on what quantity of mass is in each planet, but I don't want to drill down too far at the moment. However I will soon though. The other reason will not do this yet is because, a number of players (including one of my lecturers) pointed out what is the point of having another tutorial explain mass quantities when it's explained that the planet glows green to yellow depending on how full it is in the first tutorial.

With this in mind I can see the point what what the play testers are saying, and I will carry on with the game itself.