What is game onboarding?
In game design, onboarding refers to any interaction, tutorial, prompt, or experience in which learning takes place. Enabling the player to achieve the desired outcome in a goal orientated way. Players need to learn many elements of the game including the story or narrative, their goals or objectives and also the controls and mechanics. This can often be overwhelming, and very forgettable, if all gathered up and presented at the same time during the user experience.
Why onboarding is important
At the 大象传媒, in Children's and Education, we believe onboarding is integral to great game design. Good onboarding is implicit, and children won't even notice it. Bad onboarding is explicit, cumbersome, and can form a barrier to play.
A successful onboarding experience helps children learn the essentials and move on. However, you should be mindful that some may not yet have learned to read or have low motor function, making interactions tricky. So to help with your decision making process the following principles can help you to plan when and how to introduce narrative, goals and controls throughout the game and offer the best design solution.
These onboarding design principles reflect our core values and beliefs - which are that game onboarding should feel seamless, as it is part of the game. Your design can maintain flow and progression by introducing only the essentials, without over telling, at the exact moment the player needs it. Understand that children learn best through play. Finally you don't have to teach everything, especially if you have a deep understanding of who your players are.
Our onboarding design principles
1. Onboarding is part of the game
By thinking about onboarding from the very beginning, learning can be seamlessly integrated into the game. You should be thinking of how you are going to teach all the elements of gameplay, narrative, learning, progression and reward from the initial concept.
2. Keep to the essentials, don't over tell
Provide the least information you need to be helpful in allowing the player to move on. No matter how complicated or sophisticated the game, learning how to play should never be complex.
3. Introduce at the moment of need
Be helpful at the exact moment and give people what they need to know, when they need to know it.
4. Teach through play
Use a hands-on approach to encourage learning through play, allowing players of the game to actually do the thing they need to achieve their goal.
5. Don't teach everything
Understand what players can learn through experience and what they need help with. By allowing players to fail and try again, you don't have to teach everything.
6. Understand your players
Getting to know who you are designing for, their situation, behaviours, abilities and goals, enables you to teach them exactly what they need to know, how and when.
Our onboarding principles in action
We have created this example to show a simple onboarding experience, which uses our onboarding design principles.
In this example:
- the game starts with one simple instruction, use the arrow keys to move.
- the message does not interfere with gameplay, as it is integrated into the game.
- if the player is familiar with the controls, they can progress uninterrupted, but if not then help is available.
- when approaching a new challenge a visual clue helps the player master the action required. They then 'do' the action, having learned a new game mechanic.
- the level is designed to teach children without fear of failure, pausing the action to convey important instructional content. i.e. when teaching players how to jump.
- less is more - learn from the players interaction and know when they need help.
In short, keep game onboarding as simple as possible
With a hands-on approach, focus on what children need to be able to achieve to move on. Plan to teach them in a fun and active way when something is new or unfamiliar. Offer brief instructional content within the narrative of the game and avoid interrupting the flow.
We hope you've found this article useful and these principles help you in the decision making process when designing onboarding experiences. The aim of which is to make a great first impression, which in turn has a positive impact on user experience, engagement and satisfaction.