The following is a fixup of a Twitter thread I wrote on my Phone after watching my boy’s junior soccer game this morning.
To add to Friday’s crunch week 1 post, I have been pondering the correct strategy for structuring the in-game tutorial, following the advice of many UX (user experience) experts who are all about light touch, user-driven and even invisible tutorials.
Mr Football is a novel beast, a hybrid of two midcore genres that have never been hybridised with each other before (Football Manager crossed with Summoner’s War), so coaches do need a bit of education as it might be a bit confusing. Best UX practices apply, nevertheless.
I have been thinking of implementing the bare minimum in the initial tutorial chain to establish the game loop of recruit ➡️ boot ➡️ loot, then optional mini-tutorials on first entry to each new scene. Let the coaches coach.
There is a full Rulebook in-game, something I haven’t seen in any other title of this type as they usually leave that stuff to third-party wikis. If you want to dig deep on the RPG-style theorycrafting, all the “battle” (match) rules are explicit. I had been thinking of just leaving deep links to the Rulebook on every scene, but perhaps I could also include the tutorial texts if that more chatty, conversational style is what you prefer. More choices are good.
“Midcore” is a jargon term in the mobile game industry to denote a game that has more depth than “casual” games like popular match-3 or hidden object titles, often revolving around resource management with a complex in-game economy. Football Manager is hardcore, for example. I am aiming for something that is more complicated than FIFA Mobile, an arcade game at heart which is pitched at the lowest common denominator for widest appeal. Mr Football’s two hybrid genres are already midcore tending to hardcore, combining them can enable a lot more granularity.