Roblox games and many mobile games are notorious for offering a poor new player experience. Many spawn new players into the same game area that returning players get with minimal direction. They’ll throw up UI windows without care and spew various buttons and elements all over their screen with little explanation.

Yuck.

Poor New Player Experience is the single biggest driver of player abandonment. How can a player want to give your game a chance when they don’t even have a chance to PLAY it? If you make your game hard to understand and get into, why should players spend the time?

As ironic as it sounds, this is why the lower complexity and lower quality games on platforms typically get more early attention. They may not look as pretty or have nearly as complex mechanics, but that doesn’t matter. They’re easy and quick to pick up, and it’s immediately apparent what to do.

It would help if you had a way to tracking players that are new to your world. If you’re spawning them in with the assumption that they already know your game basics, you’re not offering a solid unique player experience. New players should altogether bypass any hub world you may have and be dropped RIGHT into gameplay. On the same note, they also shouldn’t be bothered about your endless promotions, rewards, and pop-ups. They don’t care about their day one daily login reward when they don’t even know what items do in your game yet! Drop them into the action and skip the mess.

Many players skip the tutorial of traditional games. Whether or not you agree with this - statistics are statistics. It’s our job as game designers to tune our approach of education and onboarding for player preference - and tutorials should be no different. 

Your game shouldn’t require users to click through endless pages of dialogue and boring fetch quests to introduce your base mechanics. Instead, slowly introduce your players to features and UI as they go. 

Let’s assume you want to show your player that they can dig on a beach to find buried treasure. Using guided direction, bring them to your location of choice. Leave a shovel prop on the ground with an obvious way of triggering a pickup/equip, and present a clear vision when it’s held or active for the player. Next, give some direction as to where to go on the beach and offer another apparent interaction for digging. Bam - instead reward. We can finally present the UI button for “Inventory” on their screen and show them how to open it.

Without using ANY dialog, we just taught our player the following:

What may have required pointless dialogue before - the user just taught themselves, and they feel better off for it.

Many devs will tune their game with the way they’d LIKE players to play - without any actual design decision built in to have players play this way. As a result, new players may trial and error many different things in an attempt to see what they’re supposed to do. If you’re not giving them those positive boosts, that’s not easy to figure out. 

Your new players should be unlocking items and getting bonuses constantly. Positively reinforce their behavior as they learn game mechanics and show them what they get for different tasks. This improved onboarding typically uses scaling level systems, early, significant currency awards, or free premium currency. 

Your players aren’t you. Therefore, you must get QA testers involved that have little, if any, experience with your project. It would be best if you never assumed players have played your other titles, have watched YouTube videos, or have played games that yours might be inspired by. Not only do you risk alienating your new users, but you also risk insulting them by making them feel as though they can’t do something that feels obvious for others.

The last thing players want to see when they first join a game is that they need to spend cash. But, of course, it’s doubtful that any new player will be spending a dime with you - so don’t make them leave over it. Once they unlock a fair bit of your content and have a bit of preliminary playtime, you can begin introducing them slowly. Of course, it would help if you never were assaulting them with promotions, sales, bundles, or UI elements that bait them into trying to buy game passes.

These mistakes truly just scratch the surface. As a single point of failure for many titles, the new player experience truly makes or breaks your title. Don’t make players work to enjoy and learn your game, and you’ll end up with many more dedicated players who are excited about your titles. 

- Devon