The start of something new

They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and that’s particularly crucial today with so many options vying for our free time. In games, once you’ve grabbed a player, the next most important thing is holding their attention – and if your game gets off to a slow or confusing start, you risk losing them. So a good tutorial is increasingly vital: how you show someone the ropes plays a significant part in determining how likely they are to continue.

For a game as delightfully dense as run-based strategy The Banished Vault, that’s quite the challenge. Those well versed in the genre perhaps won’t feel daunted going in, but designer Nic Tringali isn’t taking any chances. His game teaches you in a number of ways: introductory scenarios that walk you through the basics of moving around a solar system and harvesting its resources; hiding interface elements that are irrelevant to the task at hand in order to focus player attention; and finally, a manual, laid out like a physical book, with step-by-step instructions and references for just about everything in the game.

When you’re doing something completely new, as in mind-bending firstperson puzzler Viewfinder, the trick is to ease players in gradually. Here, 2D Polaroids become 3D level geometry when placed into the world; at first, the photos have been taken for you, and only once you’ve acclimatised to that do you get the chance to take snaps with your own in-game camera. This in turn has limited film and an unlimited rewind function, letting you play around with this wonderful mechanic without fear of failure. Little chance of that in Diablo IV, which sits a good deal closer to the other end of the innovation scale: the early hours have us carving through enemies like a hot knife through butter. That’s another way to hook players from the start. Keeping them there? Well, that’s just the next thing to keep designers awake at night.