Demo v0.7.4 - UX Updates

I thought that the recent v0.7 demo update was going to be the last before the release of the game, but there have been quite a few tweaks and fixes that I wanted to get in now since they're pretty important for a demo. What spurred a lot of these updates was a recent discovery that a small but significant number of demo players weren't playing further than the tutorial because they didn't realise the demo went on. This is obviously bad because the tutorial is only about 10% of the demo, and all the fun and interesting stuff comes in the other 90%!

I've written a bit extra about the bigger changes in the v0.7.4 demo update (full change log is at the bottom).

Tutorial Updates

This isn't the first time I've made a significant update to the tutorial, the previous time I re-arranged some steps to make it harder to breeze past the important sections on how the scanner works, and this time I'm adding more to ensure that players aren't getting stuck or confused by the tutorial steps. There's a step in the tutorial where you need to fly around and scan three difference resources before you're allowed to use your mining gun to extract them; quite short-sightedly I didn't add any kind of counter for the number of resources you've scanned, so players have been quite rightly a bit stumped at with this and only seem to get through by guess work. So now I've added an actual counter to the scanning and resource picking-up sections, which I hope will help with some player frustration. I also realised I should move the placement of the asteroids and resources closer to where the scanner is on the screen, to make it more comfortable when players are first learning this.

Terminal and Menu Updates

I had some feedback from a few different players that some things in the terminal screen are difficult to find, like the upgrades page on the market, and that the difference between cargo and storage wasn't clear at first. I think I initially went for a light approach to explaining this screen because I didn't want to get in the player's face with explanations that they might not need, but also because the menus were intuitive to me (which is obviously a trap most developers will fall in to).

To help with this problem I've added little popup explainers for most of the terminal pages that show when you first navigate on to them. I've kept these short since I don't think people like being assaulted with tutorial text all the time, but hopefully they'll nudge people in the right direction. There was also the issue of some players not realising that the demo continues after the tutorial, so I've made navigation to the "next job" page unavoidable, and repeat the term "next job" in a few of the popups they see up to that point, which should hammer home the existence of more stuff to play.

Another little addition which is only slightly related to this is a "NEW!" tag on items when they first become available in the market place. I added this because at the moment I'm adding a lot of new items and I realised it's not obvious when there's something new to go look at, and it would be annoying for players to go look and not find anything. It was a simple addition, but I think it looks quite neat and tidy.

Secondary Control Bindings

You can now