Desperately needs a better tutorial

[ashaaa]

Just bought this game for my wife and I to play. Was disappointed with the "notebook" style tutorial, but I figured hey, how hard can a cat cafe game be to learn? After spending 10 minutes staring at the open field, walking around, trying to click on things, and harassing our first cat while it complained about food, we finally were able to find the "design" mode, which is where we assume we can build our cafe.

After 10 more minutes of design mode telling us we cannot place our door on ANY tile, we managed to place some floor? walls? floor/walls? Nothing is labeled, nor does it say what the item does. It may have been a part of a hallway? Either way, it overlapped the item when we tried to place it on more than one tile, until the screen looked like the ending of windows solitaire.

I should not have to watch a youtube video to learn how to play a casual game 5 minutes in.

[mehtarelingolien]

I must say I absolutely agree. Just starting a game should NOT be this hard!!!!!

[Kelibath]

Agreed and thirded, I'm still trying to work out how to rotate the items.

[RoostRick]

Making more of an in-game tutorial would be a bit difficult at this point (we can't get more text into the game due to localization production stuff), but I was thinking I could record a little youtube runthrough to help folks through the basics of the game.

Do you think that would be useful? Curious to hear your thoughts!

[Kelibath]

Originally posted by RoostRick:

Making more of an in-game tutorial would be a bit difficult at this point (we can't get more text into the game due to localization production stuff), but I was thinking I could record a little youtube runthrough to help folks through the basics of the game.

Do you think that would be useful? Curious to hear your thoughts!

Honestly, FAQ adds don't even need to be text, if that causes a massive issue - you could just add to the controls section in gran's diary with a few more image icons? One showing the Q and E keys used for rotation for example - found them in the end! But having them pop up only when an item is selected isn't great game design as people may and will miss the UI.

And labels /could/ be added then localised for building element names eg. "tan carpet". Plus a minor adjustment to the explanation of how to place walls, floors, doors and windows would be good, because it was confused to the point I didn't know if I should place the floor or wall first and still don't understand interior wall placements.

It wouldn't hurt to create a YouTube tutorial/early game run, but I played this after browsing a few minutes of your Steam recording channel already, so that wasn't the only issue. And a link in the game FAQ / gran's diary to that would be somewhat immersion breaking. A few people have already commented separately saying they don't want to look it up on YT.

Sorry for the less than positive reply here! I hope it's helpful feedback though. I do love this!

[RoostRick]

No sorry needed at all! I hugely appreciate your honest and well thought out response, and agree with you. Tutorials are surprisingly big to make, requiring a lot of custom code to get it working, and we simply couldn't afford to make one when we came out (hence the Gran's Notes idea, which was relatively cheap) but with a year's distance to release, I myself am more critical of that part of the game as well.

Thanks for the feedback, I'm gonna think long and hard about how to do all this a bit better, and at least include some things that were neglected.

[ashaaa]

Originally posted by RoostRick:

No sorry needed at all! I hugely appreciate your honest and well thought out response, and agree with you. Tutorials are surprisingly big to make, requiring a lot of custom code to get it working, and we simply couldn't afford to make one when we came out (hence the Gran's Notes idea, which was relatively cheap) but with a year's distance to release, I myself am more critical of that part of the game as well.

Thanks for the feedback, I'm gonna think long and hard about how to do all this a bit better, and at least include some things that were neglected.

We played until there was no more content, but I just wanted to tune back in to say thanks for the candid and thoughtful response! Cheers.