Friday Facts #241 - New player experience

[zyklame]

What would happen if people with different backers.json want to play multi, and a name is chosen for one player's building that is not present in the other one's ?

As far as I can remember you get a desync.
Names are saved with the map.

[meganothing]

Just want to say thank you to all the players who provided station names. The diversity and idiosyncrasy of these names has somehow personalized the games I played. And given the stations an immersion bonus. Might just be me, though

[Sander_Bouwhuis]

What would happen if people with different backers.json want to play multi, and a name is chosen for one player's building that is not present in the other one's ?

That doesn't matter. You can set any name you want. When you first place something the name is randomly chosen (in this case from the backers.json file). By just putting a "0" as the only name you have the advantage that your items are numbered.

Code: Select all

{
  "backers": [
  "0"
 ]
}

This will result in stations being called 0, 1, 2, ...

After that, you can set it to any name you want. I normally set it to something descriptive like, "Ammonia+sulfur dioxide", or "Lead+zinc storage"

[SHiRKiT]

Keep in mind that at the end, we will go through the list and delete anything obscene or offensive, plus anything we find inappropriate, at our own discretion.

Could you move to a list of blocked and let them change one last time? Some people may not be able to change in time, due to IRL stuff (work, vacation, exams), and may lose the title for good.

[meganothing]

Easiest would be to delete all non names.

Easiest would be to delete the game. What is your point again?

[steinio]

Easiest would be to delete all non names.

Easiest would be to delete the game. What is your point again?

Are you dumb?
This topic is about removing offense backer names.

Go sleep again.

[meganothing]

Easiest would be to delete all non names.

Easiest would be to delete the game. What is your point again?

Are you dumb?
This topic is about removing offense backer names.

Go sleep again.

I thought the big smiley was enough indication that most of that line was just humor. But to spell out the point behind the comment:

If your suggestion was in earnest, their objective is to remove offensive stuff. Your suggestion throws out a lot of harmless entries for which backers would be rightly angered at the removal.
Even if Wube didn't say it at the kickstarter (I don't know if they did or not) it should be common sense that Wube has to remove lines that prevents releasing their game in many countries without an 18+ label or not at all (in Germany with Hitler comments). The same can't be said for non names. If there wasn't a rule at kickstarter that forbids them, throwing them out would be a very heavy-handed and unjustified move.

If your comment was meant as humour, maybe a smiley would make that more apparent

[Koub]

[Koub] Reminder : be cordial even when you disagree, no personal attacks please.

[Aeternus]

All of these points you listed basically show that the first tutorial levels should just be omitted or reworked into a single tutorial stage. Hand mining isn't really needed. Tell players that they -can- handmine (and start them out with a nearly broken tool so you can explain how to build a new tool - or omit tool breakage from the game entirely, it's a pointless mechanic for Factorio), but start with something like "there may be some equipment left in the pod ... this burner mine could be useful! ... It needs some fuel to get started. I could get some wood or hand-mine coal ... I should place a chest behind it to collect the coal"

The core concepts of placing the first miner, first belt, first inserters and such need to be hand-held. Instead of an (in my experience annoying) interrupt by dimming the screen and placing a popup message, you could suggest players to place the item in a certain location by automagically creating the building ghost in the right location.

For the order of doing things, just use the ones that naturally happen when starting a Freeplay world. Players need to learn, in order, to:
- Place burner drill on iron to produce iron ore (and create a box to put it in temporarily)
- Fuel the drill (chop a tree, create box, use remaining wood to power the drill)
- Pick up the drill after you get some ore. Place it over on coal.
- Chop a Big rock for some stone and coal.
- Create a furnace to smelt iron.
- Build new Burner Drills
- Place burner drill on iron/copper to produce ore.
- Place a Stone Furnace behind the copper/iron drills to automatically insert the smelted ore and process it into plates
- Place a water pump, boiler and steam engine to produce electricity. Build an Electrical Mine with a Belt and Burner Inserter to automatically fuel the boiler
- Build power poles
- Build the initial Research Station
- Research Automation - explain the tech tree.
- Research Radar - suggest automating the Research Production and inserting it straight into the Lab
- Build the Radar - get a power shortage and suggest to expand the power plant.
- Biter attack! A single weak biter should charge the radar/player (no more, some people don't have the controls figured out - for me figuring out how to shoot took me 3 reloads - very frustrating. A single biter for the first attack is enough).
- Suggest building turrets and a SMG to deal with the hostiles. Also suggest walls. Explain that Biters are drawn to pollution-generating structures and Radars.
- After the Radar has scanned xx sectors, explain that you need to build a Car and fuel it to reach there (this skips the grindy collectathon and sets a clear goal - build, fuel and arm a car so you can move on, which for a tutorial level is quite a goal as is)
- Move the Car to position x,y some distance from the base. Have a few biters inbetween so players get a feel for combat with vehicles.
End tutorial 1 -> Skip straight to map 2 of "A new hope" where the Rail tutorial takes place. You may want to include an Oil tutorial in that map as well and omit the no-mining-only-fighting action of New Hope lvl 3 - as that doesn't really represent Factorio much. Unless you give players a tank and some repair bots in that map, or power armor plus shield. Because that's how most players would handle combat in Freeplay.

As for the entity that represents the game most:
Probably the plain old yellow Inserter. You can do a game without belts, eventually. But not without inserters. They are also very visually active, picking up stuff and moving it from one object to another. When you see them work, you know stuff is happening, your factory is alive!

[roslow82]

First off, I love this game sooo much! Great job guys!

I had an idea about this. You could do a bit of a flashback. Show the character amid a huge factory and then flash to the beginning and use blueprints to dictate how/where he builds things to create the huge factory seen in the beginning. Obviously you guys are better at this than me, but its just an idea to incorporate some of the missing elements you pointed out.

[Jap2.0]

First off, I love this game sooo much! Great job guys!

I had an idea about this. You could do a bit of a flashback. Show the character amid a huge factory and then flash to the beginning and use blueprints to dictate how/where he builds things to create the huge factory seen in the beginning. Obviously you guys are better at this than me, but its just an idea to incorporate some of the missing elements you pointed out.

That may work - the major issue with that is that in sending a new player straight into a large factory, they will probably have no idea what's going on and perhaps get a bit intimidated.

[Merlin_pfp]

Why not use Morgan Freeman FactorioBot as narrator for demo and also in tutorials and campaigns?

He could slowly follow you around and on click a little screen or window opens with all the objectives and infos.

i already call my worker bots "bro bots"

[steinio]

Why not use Morgan Freeman FactorioBot as narrator for demo and also in tutorials and campaigns?

He could slowly follow you around and on click a little screen or window opens with all the objectives and infos.

i already call my worker bots "bro bots"

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/BroBots

[factory33]

Here my feedback to the campaign/tutorial: (what I remeber from my own expeirence with it, was pre steam release):

The part where you rebuild the partially destroyed factory was most usefull I think. This allowed to show me how it could be done and I used that help gladly and there were some "oh this is much better then my own bad solution from before" moments. But I still had the freedom to try my own strange spaghetti in parallel.
The grind later in this mission is pointless if the player doesn't get the idea of throughput. I was just sitting there and waiting, maybe adding few smelters, but never in the amount that I would do today.
Idea: This little tutorial bot others mentioned could give advice like "With the current setup it will take you ~45min to achieve the goal! Why don't you double your throuput by increasing input, smelters, belts and assemblers?" (Maybe a mission with a production per time as goal instead of a total accumulated amount would make more sense anyways...)

Later in the campaign I got stuck where you have to destroy the biter nests "the fighting mission". I always got killed. So I jumped to the freeplay there and had a lot of fun and figured out a lot myselfe then.
The next problem I run into was the oil as many here mentioned already: Why did the oil refinery stop? what is wrong? After some time (and maybe internet research I don't quite remember) I found the problem and solved it with a storage tank, but later also lost my whole storage tank contents when I wanted to ruibuild it in a better place. Since most other items go back into the inventory or to the ground it was unintuitive that the liquids vanish but I learned it the hard way.

The progression to advanced oil processing was fun and a goal to achieve back then in my first freeplay (maybe this changed due to science changes..). I think the veteran player are annoyed by it but it is good for new players to have both.

General feedback: Until today I struggle to remember the fighting keybindings since they feel unintuitive. But honestly I cannot come up with a better solution...

Feedback I got from a friend: He almost abandonned the game again since he felt like this was some strange minecraft clone with the handcrafting at the beginning.
Also he started with the freeplay directly until I told him the campaign is the tutorial.
-> A message that pops up before playing the game the first time would maybe help: "We strongly recommend to play the tutorial/campagin first, since this game is unlike any other."
If the mini tutorials in freeplay cover all the basic stuff this would again be obsolete.

[Tiggy]

Would we be maybe able to donate maps for the devs to turn into campaign missions? Only I have a pretty cool idea for a map that forces the player to use the trains to create a sprawling resource-gathering system while defending them from the aliens that I'd be happy to see used in the game. It's not quite finished, but I'm still working on it. Either way I'd LOVE to a full campaign that takes you right to the top of the tech tree with many different scenarios!

[ratchetfreak]

Here my feedback to the campaign/tutorial: (what I remeber from my own expeirence with it, was pre steam release):

The part where you rebuild the partially destroyed factory was most usefull I think. This allowed to show me how it could be done and I used that help gladly and there were some "oh this is much better then my own bad solution from before" moments. But I still had the freedom to try my own strange spaghetti in parallel.
The grind later in this mission is pointless if the player doesn't get the idea of throughput. I was just sitting there and waiting, maybe adding few smelters, but never in the amount that I would do today.
Idea: This little tutorial bot others mentioned could give advice like "With the current setup it will take you ~45min to achieve the goal! Why don't you double your throuput by increasing input, smelters, belts and assemblers?" (Maybe a mission with a production per time as goal instead of a total accumulated amount would make more sense anyways...)

At that point you could also be used to illustrate bottlenecks and how to find and fix them. Usually with some MOAR stuff.

Perhaps also make clear that belts can saturate and you'll need to upgrade them (and double up later on)

[roslow82]

First off, I love this game sooo much! Great job guys!

I had an idea about this. You could do a bit of a flashback. Show the character amid a huge factory and then flash to the beginning and use blueprints to dictate how/where he builds things to create the huge factory seen in the beginning. Obviously you guys are better at this than me, but its just an idea to incorporate some of the missing elements you pointed out.

That may work - the major issue with that is that in sending a new player straight into a large factory, they will probably have no idea what's going on and perhaps get a bit intimidated.

Yeah, that would be overwhelming. However, I pictured more as they wouldn't be able to play at that point, and it would be more of an Introduction to what a massive factory could be as part of a short cut scene, with the main character doing an internal monologue like:
Opening Scene *as a rocket launches and he finishes the game*
Internal monologue: "It took x years after crash landing, but I made it. I was finally able to send my signal into space to get rescued."
Camera begins to pan to different areas of the factory while zooming (maybe a camera shot from the rocket as its launching) out.
Then it cuts to empty world with the dialog "it all started when I crash landed.... I found minerals and began mining" then start the tutorial camera panning to minerals, then as it progresses: "I found that I could assemble machines..." *cue blueprint of machine". It could even get to the detail of: "I learned to be very efficient with buildings..." Then cue a tutorial on ratios, like you can feed 3 copper wire machines into 2 green chip machines ,etc... (I wish I had known about ratios when I first started)

To be more specific that is more along the lines of that I had envisioned. Like a narration / journal of what it took for him to build the entire factory and getting it to the point of launching a rocket.

[psychomuffin]

So I am a little late to this weeks FFF forum, but I just skimmed all of these and found very little regarding the first paragraph of this FFF:

Hi, I'm Ben (Abregado). My experience as an educator using Factorio in the classroom means I have thoroughly examined new players (young and old), and have played the first 30 minutes of Factorio for as many hours as some players spend on a single megabase. The systems in Factorio are deep and interconnected, so creating an onboarding experience for a single concept poses many exciting challenges.

Abregado, Can you tell us more about your experiences of using this in the classroom? I feel that this game does have possibilities in enhancing certain classroom topics. But I am also a bit worried about sharing this game with others because of the crack-like addictiveness of the game which would ruin a students studies in everything else! What kinds of lessons do you use it for, and how do you keep if from being a distraction?

Has anyone else used this is a lesson somehow?

[theoctopi]

My main complaint about the tutorial involved the grinding goals (make x amount of y...). Everything I do in Factorio is a means to some end. The tutorial needs to explain briefly what those ends are at each step. For example, "I'm going to need iron plates to make things. That means I'll need some burner miners to collect iron ore and some stone furnaces to smelt the ore into iron plates." Each sub-goal can be further described in similar terms. A modicum of early grinding can be excused by explaining that this will be temporary. For example, "I'm going to need some wood to make power poles, so I'd better chop down a few trees. That sounds like hard work, I wonder if I'll be able to build robot labourers later on?"

[bobucles]

At that point you could also be used to illustrate bottlenecks and how to find and fix them. Usually with some MOAR stuff.

Making things work at all is a beginner obstacle.
Making things work nicely is a novice refinement.
Making things work pretty is for experts.

I don't think bottlenecks belong in an early tutorial. Simply making sure the player can produce things is good enough. Let them worry about making it better down the line.