The beginning of the game is roughly 20 minutes of very intentional challenges, all intended to build players’ skill and confidence. The educational, introductory portion of the game takes its time. Compare this to a game that fits neatly in an existing genre - a traditional car racing game, for example - you’ve got players ranging from genre aficionados to folks who’ve never driven a car. Doing something unfamiliar can be both a blessing and a curse you have to explain everything about your unfamiliar world, but players are all equally inexperienced. It teaches you as if you’ve never played a weirdo retro, arcadey space-racing game before. It doesn’t assume any pre-existing knowledge.

Part 3: How I Built The New Player Experienceįrom a high-level, DATA WING does a bunch of things to be welcoming and respectful of different players:.

I’m hoping to support these outlandish remarks with examples from my weirdo racing game. Rebuilding your onboarding experience for the third time is a badge you’ll wear with pride… Welcoming players into your game is a serious investment it’s a commitment to slow, caring education and thoughtful immersion into your world. A white-knuckle prayer that players will stick around.Įducating players is a huge topic - too big for me to attempt - but I posit that the more care you take making your game welcoming, the more players will stick around and become invested.

Loading screens with controller mappings, regular game-halting popups and ambiguous instructions all elicit a similar pain response. When devs speak the words “We just gotta add a tutorial…” it physically hurts me.

I’m excited to share some of the practical things I did to make the game welcoming as well as outline a bunch of stuff that went wrong along the way.Īll too often, it feels like the onboarding portion of a game doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Welcoming players into DATA WING was uniquely challenging. 😅Īnd it worked DATA WING has had over 5 million downloads, has a user rating of 4.9 stars on the App Store and Google Play and has been volunteer-translated into 17 languages. Oh, and it was released completely free.Ī lot of what makes DATA WING special isn’t immediately apparent - it presents as just another mobile game - but that was a ploy to help it reach (and hopefully delight) as broad an audience as possible. It’s an unusual game the racing mechanic involves thrusting off walls to gain speed, it’s set inside a teenager’s smartphone and there’s a multi-layered narrative that slowly reveals itself over the game’s 90 minutes. DATA WING is a challenging, retro-styled racing game with a story (iOS, Android).

Ios data wing game