Ingnomia

Ingnomia

RTiger32 Apr 7, 2020 @ 11:48am
Needs tutorial!
Seriously, how do I get started?
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Showing 1-15 of 16 comments
Roest  [developer] Apr 7, 2020 @ 11:55am 
As strange as it sounds as a new player I would say wait a couple of months. I'm in the middle of a big UI rework and after that the game will look very different. Other than that just watch some youtube videos for Gnomoria. The gameplay is pretty much the same.
RTiger32 Apr 7, 2020 @ 12:02pm 
Can't argue. The current UI is very unfriendly with nothing labeled.
pingu-fred Apr 10, 2020 @ 10:43am 
thanks for this roest ! i own gnomoria but just found out about this game :) i will wait until the next update to try it
fuddy_duddy003 Apr 12, 2020 @ 8:19am 
That's really a big update worth to be wait.
But i am looking to how to get deeper, because i am not able to enter without level 2 digging pickaxe.
Lurlex Apr 21, 2020 @ 8:06am 
There never used to be such a thing as a "tutorial" in the older days of gaming, except in primitive and simpler forms that are nothing like modern-day tutorials. As years passed and the video game industry exploded into the mainstream, little things a bit "like" tutorials in games started to emerge ... the closest things I can think of that can compare to modern-day tutorials in the console era are some things you can find in older jRPGs, but even they fell well short of what we're currently used to in terms of hand-holding.

You just kind of have gotten to come to expect it. Youtube and reading will work out for you for now. We didn't even used to have Youtube back in the day. You either had a subscription to a game magazine, tuned into a weekly themed video game television show (and prayed they'd feature the game you were thinking about), or Nintendo even once had a toll-payment hotline you could call for tips. We still managed to play and love the games back then.

So, yeah, you still have it better than we did, because you have the Internet itself. You can freely look this stuff up, and it won't take a significant amount of extra time to do so, you're just worried because the game didn't hand it to you on a silver platter. Don't forget that this game is inspired in a major way by Dwarf Fortress, which is definitely a "either you learn to be patient and do a bit of reading or watching before you know what to do, or you don't play" experience. Nobody's going to hate you if you don't want to do that, but a game like this is definitely not for someone who can't stand 5 minutes of self-motivated research.

Just watch the videos for now, everything you need is only a single google search away. There's no reason to panic on an in-development game if there's not yet a built-in education system. It's really a newer concept than you think it is, and as the dev says, it's a work in progress, the mechanics are in a state of flux, and it wouldn't even make sense to make one right now. One will eventually come. For now, if you want to play, you can adapt and learn to improvise for yourself for a bit. It's a good skill to develop, self-reliance.
Last edited by Lurlex; Apr 21, 2020 @ 8:16am
RTiger32 Apr 21, 2020 @ 7:26pm 
Even in the very old games they gave the the manual for the game and back then people actually read the manual. I don't care about no hand holding, but having to guess every single button on the UI which isn't labled? No thanks.
The Rabid Otter Apr 23, 2020 @ 12:21pm 
Does this game have a manual? It seems even more complicated than RimWorld. I want to build my little gnomes a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ house, but as of yet all they have are fields and a groves.
YetiChow May 6, 2020 @ 9:21am 
The lack of tutorials is what kills every game that recently tries to make it in this genre -- and Dwarf Fortress has only survived as long as it has because the game explicitly "teaches you how to play it" through tooltips and the sheer obvious-ness of the early steps. Once you get players to understand the idea of "try, fail, learn from it, try again (but better), you're fine, so you don't need to explicitly explain all the end-game stuff... but getting the new players to that point is still a major hurdle. They have to at least be able to get a functional and self-sustaining settlement up and running before the training wheels can come off.

The original Gnomoria would have had a lot less drama to deal with if it had a good tutorial, and thus less players bouncing off the early-game section. The same is true for a whole bunch of sandbox games -- I've watched many of them rise and fall lately, the fall always begins when they get a surge of new players who don't follow along with the development but just jump straight into the game and bounce off the early-game learning curve pretty damn hard.

I realise that when you're in the middle of creating the game, going back to explain the systems (which will, in all likelihood, be updated and refined at a later date anyway) can seem like a pointless chore; but it's the difference between life and death for your community. There comes a point where there are so many new players that it's impossible for your supporter community to reach out and welcome them all and teach them how to play/overcome the early learning curve so that they can enjoy your game... BEFORE that "critical mass" arrives, you need your game to do the welcoming and on-boarding all by yourself. Or, alternatively, get ready to drown under complaints like "the Gnomes won't _____ like I tell them to the AI must be BROKEN!!!", people badly over-straining their computers by creating tons of needless busywork (e.g. using stockpiles + storage in ways that creates more hauling tasks rather than cutting the total number down like a good system should), and so on.

I mean, you're already getting players asking how to do the basic things like get started out in the game, and these are the players who WANT to learn; who are prepared to come here and ask. Think about the sheer number of people who are upset with the original Gnomoria but will eventually take a look at Ignomia... if they bounce off the early-game because they can't understand things (and let's be real here: these are people who can't wrap their head around simple concepts like "game development is complex and challenging, and you can't easily guess how long it will take" or "a developer only has so much time in a day and can't respond to everything immediately as well as work on a game full-time"), how do you imagine they're going to react?

I'm not saying you should be held to the tyranny of ^that above group^, but you do need to do something to make your game accessible to new players or you're just going to face the full fury of angry gamers who feel stupid (for not being able to figure out the basic gameplay) but would rather blame you as the developer for "making a bad game!!!" rather than admit that they can't wrap their head around it. And, as snarky and cynical as I may be here, that's the last thing I want -- I really do want Ignomia to succeed where so many similar games have stumbled.

To learn from Gnomoria's mistakes you can't just be "Gnomoria, but X% better", you have to try doing some things differently -- and I realise that you're already doing that from a behind-the-scenes perspective, but you also need to make some changes to the presentation. The UI re-work you mention will assuredly help, and things like tooltips will too, but there's really no substitute for a good narratively-linked tutorial (i.e. bringing players into the story of the game world, letting them see the "in-universe" perspective of how + why things happen and how they should/can control the story.) Because a tutorial does more than just show off the basics -- a good one, at least, gets players excited to try new things and experiment and learn; and it gets them used to the idea of thinking through the situation and actively solving problems (not just reacting to them, but foreseeing and preventing them.) A really good tutorial should show that not everything is a straightforward question, and show off the potential for unexpected or creative solutions. After all, there's no "right" way to play the game (or theoretically won't be once it has all its pieces in place), so a good tutorial for a game like this should very quickly depart from linear thinking and start encouraging players to actively design solutions themselves.

Ideally the tutorial should start BEFORE the gameplay, even -- have the narrative pick up "when the player decides to found a settlement", walk them through picking a load-out (giving reasons why specific stuff is chosen, and in my ideal imagination not making them choose specific items but saying things like "you'll need to provide food and drink for X days while you set up a local supply" and "make sure you have a plan for how you'll defend your new settlement" and so on) so that players understand the point of those options and can make good decisions -- and will know how to incorporate new options + knowledge as it's added. Carry that pattern through all the the early-game and into the early-mid-game, so that players aren't learning a "recipe" by rote but are always thinking about the effect of their design choices, and you'll have a lot more players who understand the gulf between their imagination vs what they've actually ordered/created in the game. At that point the players can figure the rest out themselves; and when they inevitably do come up against something that doesn't work the way it should (whether it's a genuine bug or an unexpected interaction/some kind of oversight) they'll be well-primed to go looking for the cause and give a useful report.

So, that work of designing a good tutorial pays off in the long-run -- and the added benefit of a "problem-solving and designing" based tutorial rather than a specific "recipe" style one is that you won't have to update it because even if the specific details change it will be focussed on general ideas anyway and those will remain the same.
RTiger32 May 7, 2020 @ 1:21pm 
I prefer to think of it as...

Try, Fail, Learn, Try again, Fail harder.

Because a player that plays a game like this expecting to 'win', never will.
Last edited by RTiger32; May 7, 2020 @ 1:22pm
YetiChow May 7, 2020 @ 11:29pm 
Originally posted by RTiger32:
I prefer to think of it as...

Try, Fail, Learn, Try again, Fail harder.

Because a player that plays a game like this expecting to 'win', never will.

This is exactly the kind of attitude that a tutorial needs to ease new players into -- but today's players aren't the same generation who are used to being forced to try different combinations of buttons over and over until one works... they expect the game to tell them why something didn't work, because that's what the vast majority of games do these days.

There's a balance to be had here -- sure Ignomia is trying to appeal to the "I want to play the game my way, not have my hand held or be put on rails for an extended tutorial" crowd; but the simple and sad reality is that most people these days don't have the time or interest to learn a game "the hard way" anymore. We're passing through the generation of gamers who have grown up with strategy guides and "you have to look for the information yourself"; we're now reaching a new generation who are used to step-by-step video walkthroughs and games that drip feed their mechanics to the player in the first 40 minutes or so (for games that even last that long.)

There is no "right" way to play a game like Ignomia and so there's no tutorial to teach players a "right way", but there are certain skills which the player needs to basically understand (that whole "try, fail, learn, try again, fail harder, bounce back with more plans and bigger dreams" skill-set) if they're going to explore more than the surface of the game.

It needs to be a tutorial not of how to "play the game and beat it", but how to understand it -- how to see the moving pieces, see their place in the larger machine, and how to appreciate the "music of the gears" and find any discordant notes that come from gears that are stuck.

Without a tutorial, it's too easy for players to get stuck in a loop of "try, fail, try the same thing the same way, fail the same way, learn nothing in the process."
Lucied Fath May 25, 2020 @ 7:58pm 
Watch videos on Gnomoria. They straight up carbon copied that game (only changing the trees, everything else is the same exact game.) Valve really needs to look at the ♥♥♥♥ they let onto Steam. Copying the game with the same exact assets and all, then putting it up for free is a straight up ♥♥♥♥ move, and I'm sure it's a copyright infringement.
Roest  [developer] May 26, 2020 @ 1:19am 
Originally posted by Divicus:
Watch videos on Gnomoria. They straight up carbon copied that game (only changing the trees, everything else is the same exact game.) Valve really needs to look at the ♥♥♥♥ they let onto Steam. Copying the game with the same exact assets and all, then putting it up for free is a straight up ♥♥♥♥ move, and I'm sure it's a copyright infringement.

Yea Valve should totally do that or you could simply inform yourself before posting ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Maybe you'd even apologize but I doubt that. I so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate the internet and the outrage culture these days. Makes you really question why create something and give it away for free.
Lucied Fath May 26, 2020 @ 11:45pm 
How about you actually look into the copyright laws. Even with your permission to continue the work on the previously made game, you still cannot release it under a different name without changes to make it at least different. All you are currently allowed to do is create mods for Gnomoria without breaking said copyright laws. Unless you build the game from the ground up and do not use the assets at all.

You can try to be a little ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to people who you think are not informed, but be sure to know your ♥♥♥♥ before being that smart ass.
Lucied Fath May 26, 2020 @ 11:47pm 
Oh and dont act like you aren't intending on selling this product, in your actual "informative" statement you made it clear that it was at least on your mind as you said you would have to talk with the actual owner of this product about how to go forward with things if you were to sell it.
Roest  [developer] May 27, 2020 @ 5:13am 
Yea I totally intend to sell it. Totally got me here. Even though I have said it countless times that it is free and always will be free. Not sure why but this kind of feels like talking to a flat earther.

Quoting your post here in case you change it later.

Originally posted by Divicus:
Oh and dont act like you aren't intending on selling this product, in your actual "informative" statement you made it clear that it was at least on your mind as you said you would have to talk with the actual owner of this product about how to go forward with things if you were to sell it.

This is beyond stupid. So asking the owner of a sprite sheet to use it in a free game and him giving permission and saying, " that in case I want to sell it at some point we have to figure something out", now equals me intending to sell it. I just leave it here.

Last edited by Roest; May 27, 2020 @ 5:32am
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