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Tutorial sitrep idea

Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2014 11:39 pm
by MatGB
Reading through multiple threads from newer players recently it's very apparent that the steep learning curve of the game is a problem, and one that we might want to think about solving over time as the game develops.

One idea occured to meā€”have a series of Pedia articles about different game concepts aimed at newer players, and have them linked from the sitrep panel at appropirate moments.

For example, if a player builds a premade ship design, especially a Troop Ship, it could trigger a sitrep on completion that links to a tutorial page that summarises stuff (and links to the current pedia article) about Fleet Upkeep, and why the troop ship might need replacing in the ship design window because it's fragile, you need to build lots, etc.

Because it's sitrep driven, experienced players can simply turn them off, but new players can take advantage of it and learn stuff as it happens. Most of the sitreps themselves should be easily coded into existing effects because it would be stuff like completed a premade ship, or completed researching a key tech.

Plus, most of the work could be done by those of us that find the backend code baffling (but we'd need help on occasions), and it could be an ongoing project that gets added to as and when we see questions, etc.

Good idea? Doable?

Re: Tutorial sitrep idea

Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 1:19 am
by Dilvish
Sounds like a good idea to me, and probably very doable. I don't off the top of my head recall for sure if our vartext constructs used to make sitreps would also support generic pedia article links (as opposed to the tech, design, etc. hotlinks currently used in sitreps). Geoff probably knows if that's already in place. If it's not, it probably should be. If it already is, then I think you could just go start writing up new tutorial articles and adding references to them into various sitreps. So long as those references appear at the end of the sitrep they shouldn't bother experienced players (though they might then also be less likely to be noticed by novices).

Here's some related ideas that I think would fit with what you're talking about and that would (I think) help a lot:

I think that long term (if not sooner) we'd want some kind of popup notice for things more important than the typical sitrep -- it could just be controlled by a new sitrep attribute, and could also be deactivated with a filter like normal sitreps are.

I also think that we'll want to support alternate content sets that are selectable at game start -- instead of the current 'default' directory being a toplevel directory, it could be located in a 'content' directory, which could also have other subdirectories for alternative content. Ideally any files not found in the selected content would be (attempted to be) substituted with files from the default directory, though I kinda suspect that would be the biggest coding hassle of the whole idea.

Then, one of the alternate content selections could be "Tutorial" that would be full of scripted popup notices to help step a new player through the learning curve.