This is the first time your players will interact with your game. And essentially the first impression that they have.
We want this to be motivating and engaging. We want to hook the players right from the very start and give them a really positive and rewarding experience.
Game onboarding introduces your players to the game rules that you set, and the control systems that you have in place.
Think of the game onboarding as the learning experience for the player, and teaching them exactly how to get about and interact properly with your game.
Whereas the first time user experience is the feelings and the emotion of your game, the onboarding focuses on teaching them how to play.
In this video you can watch step by step on how we built and approached the first time user experience and onboarding in the game Mafia city.
The entire sequence lasts approximately 40 seconds in the game and could be refined further for even more streamlining.
Pillar one is learning, where we teach the controls game rules and give some context to all of that and also set some tasks for the player to achieve. But make sure that these tasks have meaning. So if we kill a baddie, make sure we reward them with a coin or something like that.
Pillar two is discovery. This is where we remove friction. We encourage engagement from the player and delight them and add some emotion into it.
Pillar three is all about motivation, where we can immerse the player and give them rewards to some challenges and future content, as well as giving some player agency, allowing them to run around in a safe environment and non death scenario and let them play around and get used to the game.
And by using these pillars, we can make sure that we always include some, if not all of these options when we first welcome the player into our game.