Don’t Spook the Newbies: Unveiling 5 Proven Game Onboarding Techniques

Welcome to issue 53 of The Acagamic Tip Tuesday. In today's newsletter, I'll show you how to make a good onboarding process for your game. Understanding the art of onboarding is crucial if you want to attract and keep players, make sure they enjoy your game, and, in the end, make your game a success. By learning this skill, you can expect to see improved player retention rates and overall satisfaction with your game. Unfortunately, many game designers don’t realize how important onboarding is or start working on it too late in the development process (i.e., when they are close to shipping the game), which makes onboarding an afterthought. Instead, you should have an onboarding plan during pre-production or when game production begins. With the following five-step plan, based on what I heard Celia Hodent, an industry expert who worked on Fortnite, explain in a recent interview, you can avoid these problems and give your players a great experience when they first start playing your game.

Onboarding is the process by which new players learn how to play a game, and it should be designed so that learning how to play the game comes naturally and intuitively. Players can easily learn how to use the different mechanics, rules, and systems of a game in a good onboarding system without feeling confused or overwhelmed. You want to give…