Redesigning Auro's Tutorial

Since Auro‘s release earlier this month, we’ve gotten a ton of great, helpful feedback. Firstly, almost all of the reviews are 5-star reviews. Lots of people – most everyone who wrote a review – seems to love the game. So that’s the good news!

On the other hand, some of our other 5-star reviews sound a bit like this:

“You know, I tried Auro out at first and I was kinda just confused and overwhelmed. I mean, 31 tutorial missions?! Jeez Louise! Luckily, I decided to give it one last shot and just dive into Play Mode. And wowow, I am happy I did, because I really love the game now!”

That’s not a real review, but I promise we’ve read a bunch of reviews/forum posts/comments that sound a lot like that. So that’s great for that guy, but it begs the question: how many people didn’t give Auro a second shot? How many people got overwhelmed and just stepped away because of the sheer number of tutorials? We have no way of knowing, but even if it was only a handful of people, we’d love them to be able to enjoy the game, too.

Auro isn’t a hard game to learn, but it’s also not Flappy Bird. While it does have a pretty intuitive core mechanism (bop monsters into the water), it also has a lot of special abilities and rule combinations that you do need to know in order to play.

I have no doubt in my mind that once people know how to play Auro, they’ll love it. The question is: how do we get people there?

The Current Auro Tutorial

Here’s a little secret about Auro‘s Tutorial mode: I coded it and designed it all within about two weeks of release! Some of you, especially our Android players, know that until the first iOS version, Auro actually had another mode called “Story Mode“. This was what it sounded like: cutscenes, a bunch of very easy gameplay and some crammed in, hand-holdey tutorials. Overall, it was a nightmare for everyone, and when we removed it, we did not receive even ONE complaint! Imagine that – the removal of a huge feature, and zero complaints! Yikes.

Story Mode did a terrible job at actually teaching anything about the game, because it was trying to do that *and* set up some story stuff about the lore and world *and* be a kind of fun replayable mode. It chased all three rabbits, and caught none of them.

So I slammed in this new Tutorial Mode. My thinking was that this mode was actually kind of fun to play, being that it wasn’t like our old hand-holdey tutorial. In this one, there is still random generation and some “play” to it. Further, since our old tutorial taught about 20% of what you needed to know to play the game, I thought it’d be a good idea to have our new tutorial teach you… basically 100% of the rules of the game.

I actually went into it thinking “man, people are going to like that there’s all these missions you can do!” Maybe it’ll be like a traditional “videogamey-unlocky” fun kind of thing! I thought having 31 of the missions was a selling point!

It did not occur to me that seeing 31 tutorials would feel “overwhelming” to people, which, now that people have told me so, seems like an obvious problem. Another thing that didn’t occur to me is that even though players can stop doing the tutorials any time they want to and hop into Play Mode (including after having done ZERO tutorials). I kinda expected a lot of players to play maybe 5-10 tutorials and then go check out Play Mode, and then come back maybe later, or whatever.

In reality, people felt really overwhelmed by the prospect of 31 tutorials, and they felt like they had to complete them all before they got into Play Mode. One guy emailed me saying that he was a huge 100 Rogues fan, but that he couldn’t get into Auro because there are so many rules. For those who haven’t played 100 Rogues, it has about 10-20 times as many rules as Auro does!

Ultimately, the story of Auro‘s tutorial is one of us doing way too little originally (with Story Mode), and then doing way too much with the launch version.

Auro Tutorial 2.0

Was chatting with the powerful game design wizard DanC the other day, and he said something that resonated with me:

“Players will say they are confused and dislike your game when you throw them into the deep end, even though they’ll end up retaining better.”

The general idea with these changes are, let’s give the player some basics, but do not allow him to bore himself with the nitty-gritty details. Force him to dive into Play Mode much, much sooner.

So here’s what we’ve done for the next version of the Auro Tutorial. These changes will be included in the massive upcoming 1.19 patch (which improves on everything from high level gameplay, to feedback, and even the HUD has gotten a complete makeover).

First of all, we compressed the total number of tutorials from 31 down to 20. We did this by combining some lessons together, but also by just deleting a few lessons outright.

An example of one lesson we deleted outright was the tutorial that teaches about the Trickster. The Trickster, for those who don’t know, does just one thing: swaps places with the player. They’re not directly offensive or dangerous to the player, and there’s only ever one of them on a given stage. We feel that this kind of a rule is the sort of thing that we can “omit” from the direct tutorial, and allow players to figure out while they play.

An example of “combined lessons” were the old Tutorial 1 and Tutorial 2, which taught about “movement” and “bumping” (knocking a monster backwards; your basic “attack”), respectively. The thing is, moving is so intuitive and easy to figure out that it really doesn’t need its own tutorial. The Bumping tutorial – the new Lesson 1 – now just makes a brief mention of how you tap the screen to move, which we figure is enough.

Not only have we reduced the number of tutorials from 31 to 20, but we also hide the last 10 until players reach Rank 4 in Play Mode. When players first start up a game and go into the tutorial screen, this is what they’ll see:

Hopefully, this is a *lot* less intimidating. Once you reach the 10th tutorial, at the bottom there little Quillsh says “Go play Play mode, come back when you’re rank 4!”

Once you do reach Rank 4, if you come back you unlock the other 10:

Hopefully these changes will make the prospect of “getting into Auro” way less intimidating for people. We’re also making a bunch of other smaller changes, like improving our text-feed (the top of the screen that has text) to make it easier to read and review messages if you miss one.

One other interesting thing: at least one person seemed to find the game more daunting because Quillsh makes mention of the fact that we provide a game manual. This player said something along the lines of “there’s a freaking manual? Holy crap this game is complicated!” So apparently people associate “manuals” with “high levels of complexity” these days (even though toasters come with manuals!). That’s something to keep in mind, and we’ve now removed mention of the manual from Quillsh’s dialogue. It’s still accessible from the title screen’s “How To Play” button, though.

Overall, we’re sorry we weren’t able to make this happen for launch, but we think Auro will have a very long life, and so ultimately, one month of bad tutorial won’t be too costly. We’re looking for more ways to help teach the game in the future. If you have ideas, please let us know!