Atari Combat: Tank Fury FTUE — Scott Fine Game Design

Built the FTUE to cover basic combat, base building and obtaining tanks through gacha.

About:

Our FTUE has been iterated on quite a few times. Currently, it acts as a fully on rails guide for our new players. It teaches the basic mechanics of Atari Combat:Tank Fury. When combined with the Training Missions the player gets a complete view of all of the features in Atari Combat:Tank Fury.

Platform: iOS/Android

Engine: Unity

Tools Used: Unity, Excel, Perforce, Brick, Visual Studio (JSON), proprietary tools

Duration: 1 year

Release Date: September, 2020

Role Detailed Info:

The earliest version of the FTUE wasn’t fully on rails and ended after the 5th battle. After Soft Launch and reviewing the data, we noticed we had heavy player churn at the locations where the FTUE went off-rails. We also noticed that players were not engaging with the Training Missions in early iterations. To rectify this we made the full FTUE on rails and extended the FTUE slightly to have the player activate the first Show Me in the Training Mission list.

An unexpected result of the FTUE becoming fully on rails was that a couple of the tanks would break the FTUE. You see, the green tank has an ability which affects a random gem. In the early version the player would activate the green tank’s ability and then go off rails. When the system is fully on rails the green tank’s random gem destruction throws everything for a loop. So instead of changing the already balanced tank ability and throwing off the later feel of the game, I rebuilt the FTUE from the ground up to have a rigged gem board, and moved all the green tank abilities to the last step in their respective battles. This way the player could still use the ability but it wouldn’t break the board as there were no additional steps to take on the board before the battle ended.

Another unexpected issue was the power ups throwing the battles off. In battle 3 the player is tasked with creating a power up by swiping a gem to create a 4 match. Now depending on where you swiped from (up to down or down to up) the power up could appear in the upper row or the lower row. For a fully on rails FTUE this creates problems because you don’t have the freedom to select different gems based on where the power up appeared. So strapped for resources, I reconfigured the board to have 2 possible paths based on where the power up appeared. The power up would appear in a couple different locations, but if it appears above a match is made below to drag it back down to the appropriate spot. This ended up creating an entirely different path in these scenarios but we accounted for the scenarios and now the player has no idea there are multiple possibilities as they play through the FTUE.

Making the FTUE fully on rails ended up helping with the player churn as the players were not left wondering what to do early on and were given the guidance needed to make it through the FTUE. By activating the first Show Me we saw an increase in engagement with the Show Mes and an increase in overall player retention. Without these changes I don’t think the Training Missions would have been as successful as they were.