Onboarding in Incremental Games
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Remove the Tutorial
Incremental games are a weird genre. They are synonymous with ‘clicker games’, or ‘idle games’, which generally involve clicking a button and watching a number go up. They are controversial among the gaming community. Some people love them, and some people hate them. Those that hate them are often vocal in their complaints: incremental games are shallow, incremental games aren’t strategic enough, incremental games are just plain boring! Some can barely even be considered games! An infamous example is the 2002 game, Progress Quest. After you create a character, there is literally nothing you can do to interact with the game. It automatically battles monsters, upgrades equipment, and so on. All you can do, basically, is watch numbers go up.
Perhaps Progress Quest isn’t a good example, though. It was a parody of the online multiplayer games that were popular at the time, and arguably was created as a bit of a joke. Most incremental games, fortunately, involve at least some degree of player interaction. You have to click a button to earn more cookies, or decide whether you want to purchase a shrimp boat or a hockey team. In terms of actual gameplay, every game is different, of course, but a trait shared by many incremental games is a simple and elegant onboarding process.
Candy Box 2 has a start screen that is almost absurdly simple. The screen is entirely empty except for a line of text telling you how many candies you have, and a button below which lets you “Eat all the candies”. There is essentially only one option available to the player. After you have collected 10 candies, however, another button appears right below the first one. Now, you have gained the ability to “Throw 10 candies on the ground”. In this way, as you progress, more and more options become available. The game is careful to ensure that every new option is clearly visible, at least while the player is still learning.
The onboarding experience is carefully tailored and completely streamlined without feeling too linear or forced. New concepts are introduced one by one, so as to never feel overwhelming. The minimalist, retro style of Candy Box 2 is limiting, by design. The game does not have access to colours or flashy icons that it can use to grab your attention. But it doesn’t need them. Buttons are clear and sparse enough that a new one is immediately obvious. With clever use of a changing mouse cursor, it is always clear what can and cannot be interacted with.
On the other side of the spectrum is Cookie Clicker. The start screen of Cookie Clicker leaves much to be desired. UI elements are unpolished, and a weird blank space takes center stage. But that’s not the point. Just like Candy Box 2, Cookie Clicker leads with one main feature on its start screen: A huge cookie taking up a huge chunk of space, just begging to be clicked on. Unlike Candy Box 2, however, Cookie Clicker gives a hint of what is to come. On the right side of the screen is the ‘Store’, with blacked-out portraits and hidden names. Once the player hits 15 cookies, however, the first item in the list glows, and a coloured image replaces the blacked-out version, clearly signifying that it is ready to be clicked on and interacted with.
UI elements like that guide and teach the player without being obtrusive. The player retains the freedom to not interact with it if they do not want to. At the same time, it teaches players about the way the game uses UI. Maybe glowing icons have new interactions, while greyed-out ones are temporarily unavailable. Things like this might be obvious to a seasoned gamer or designer, but not everybody instinctively picks these things up, especially the less technologically savvy. Teaching these interactions early on, while the player is still looking around for things to click on and interact with, saves them from failing to figure it out later on.
Of course, the system isn’t perfect. It is inevitable that users will still fail to notice a new button appearing, or see a new feature but don’t realize that they are supposed to interact with it. A common solution I have noticed in games is to simply force the user to notice. A giant box pops up, reminding the user that there is a new feature for them to explore, or a flashing arrow points to the new feature, blocking access to the rest of the game until the user acknowledges it. I do recognize that these can be really helpful for the less savvy, but I always feel like they are inelegant; and as a user, feel almost patronizing and often detract from my experience of a game.
In a similar vein, many modern games have obscenely long, un-skippable, tutorial sequences. Certainly, some sort of a tutorial is generally necessary to teach basic controls and essential concepts, but past that, I believe games should strive towards an instructional onboarding experience so players can learn with some degree of freedom. Tutorials should be free-flowing and feel like part of the experience instead of a separate teaching environment.
Incremental games are definitely not for everyone. Not everyone appreciates the simple concepts and undemanding gameplay loops. In terms of onboarding, however, I think incremental games manage to get some things right. Although it certainly helps that incremental games are fairly simple and don’t have as much to teach new players compared to other games, I think that game developers and designers alike stand to learn a lot from testing out the onboarding procedures of incremental games.
