Star Citizen Live Gamedev: New Player Experience

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Well, basically, obviously that one was hand-scripted from end to end, and so if any new feature came online, anything else that the player needed to learn came online at that point in time, it was very difficult to separate things and move them apart and then interject new aspects of gameplay there. So it really fell to the wayside as we were so heavy in development at that time. So upkeeping that thing just became too big of a task. So we let it slide and we knew that we were going to come back to it at a later point in time.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It was also outside of the Persistent Universe. It was in its own little pocket dimension based off the old hangar module back then.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Well, I think now we're so far along, we know what our base hero mechanics are from a player perspective, we know what our base mechanics are from a ship perspective. So I think right now is one of the best times to be doing it. But in previous games and everything like that, first level and last level were always the ones that we built. Just because you understood, here's everything that I need to teach and then I can do it at that point in time. But since we have such a high learning curve, we decided, all right, there's certain things in here that we needed done first, and we felt once those were completed... and really that to me was the contextual controls and contextual hints. Those were the biggest things and everything was built around that thought process and what we wanted to teach. And then from there we felt like we can add on certain things later on and have it be still a cohesive experience, but also at the same time drip-feed it a little bit better, because I think getting in and playing it and not having some of those hints, some of those controls, because we use all the keyboard and plus some with all of our shift modifications and everything, we wanted to make sure that the players could always remember it. Let's say they went away for two weeks or three months or whatever, and then they come back to it. It's like, how did I do this again? So on and so forth. So we wanted to kind of always have those constant reminders there. And then that really was the catalyst for us pushing forward on this.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

From my standpoint, because I was the one who wrote the initial doc, it was really teaching the player very, very core basic things. So getting up, moving around, what are the basic controls for this, interactions, eating, drinking, anything that will kill you if you don't do it. And then once you start getting into other aspects as far as what happens when you buy something, and we have a deeper thread there that we haven't unlocked yet, as far as being able to go and use a weapon or be able to go and try something out, or being able to try and compare, and all of those aspects that need to be taught as well. Then there's the player combat side from an FPS and then there's the ship combat side. So us just hitting very high-level things, which was teaching you interaction, teaching you how to eat and drink, teaching you how to deal with inventory. We still need to teach more on that. Teaching you how to walk and run and jump and then being able to teach you how to get out of the spaceport and fly your ship. But still trying to dole that out and kind of have some of those repetitious experiences that sometimes people need to do to actually learn it properly.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

So on the front end, when you first boot the game up, we ask the player, do you want to take part in the new player experience? If they do, then we will set their start location to Area 18, because that's where the new player experience takes place. And then we will guide them through the process just automatically. So as soon as they're in game, the mission is accepted. And we will guide them through, as Todd was saying, all the basics, eating and drinking. And we will guide them through Area 18 onto the tram, over to the spaceport, into their ship, and then flying around. So yeah, we start right at the beginning.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

This is your hab in Area 18. So you spawn just as you would spawn normally, except in this case, there's the tutorial running already.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

So mobiGlass was another thing that we felt we needed to teach. And also the other thing with this room, the idea is that you're locked in this room. Obviously with the Persistent Universe, there's not too many places that you can actually lock a player into a space. A traditional tutorial would be, let's pause the game, let's make it so that the player has to push this button for it to continue, and so on and so forth. So we have that here in certain areas, but once you walk out of the hab, you're free. And trying to teach that, it's very difficult.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Well, the thought process behind it was basically we have two locations that, in order to get to our shopping area, you can walk directly from the habs to the shopping area, and then you've got some that you actually have to get on the tram to. So Area 18 and Lorville are the only ones that you can walk to the shopping area. Other ones, New Babbage and Orison, you have to go to the tram first. So we wanted to also just teach the player, all right, hey, this is clean and simple. It allows you to go shopping. And then also with Cubby Blast, this one made sense from an armor and weapon perspective to lead the player there to that point.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

So right now the player's exited the hab and we're going to send them down to Cubby Blast so they can get some experience in a shop, basically. The main thing we wanted to teach there was you don't talk to the NPC behind the counter like you do in most games, but you interact with the kiosk. So we're breadcrumbing the player down through the elevator, which will be the first time that they've used an elevator. So we guide them to the little panel next to the elevator itself and teach them to interact with that. And then when they get in, tell them which floor they need to go to. To be honest, they can't really go wrong at this point, because there is no other exit than the elevator. Theoretically, it's literally their first time in game, so it doesn't do any harm to put a little marker over the elevator panel and say, hey, press this.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

I was going to say, at every fork in the road through the landing zone, basically, the branding team and the environment art team have gone through and said, okay, if you go this way, then this is what you get. If you go to the left, then you get this other experience or shopping or so on and so forth. So this is something that we will roll out to every major landing zone, and then we'll also figure out how we can do it in space stations, just so that it's very, very clear for the player to understand where they can go and what they can do.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

The signage change in ArcCorp is huge. When I first heard of them adding signs, I'll admit, I kind of dismissed it. You're going to add some signs, some directional arrows here and there, and seeing the sheer amount that they've done and how effective each one is, I was like, oh, okay. We're coming up on the first big obvious one, a brand new kind of overhead map of Area 18 here.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Yeah, it took us a while to go through and work out. Obviously, for every major landing zone, we want it to feel unique to itself. So, for example, an airport sign in Germany is different than an airport sign in the UK versus it's different in the US. But it still has something to do with an airplane. Same with food. In Asia, it would be different than in Europe. So there's certain terminology and certain things that we look at to basically say, okay, hey, this is something that we can carry through, but this will feel special for ArcCorp versus, all right, when we do Lorville, it'll be a somewhat different icon pass, but it's got to fit still in this box.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Well, and even with this, so for example, you go in and buy a weapon, we want you to be able to go and test the weapon so that you don't have buyer's remorse. All right, I'm spending my hard-earned cash on this. What am I actually getting? Does this fit my play style? So that to me is going forward in the future. This is one of the big things that was called out in the original new user experience that obviously hasn't made it to this one.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Whether it's a firing range within its actual location, so the player actually walks up to it, or via sim pod or something. But the idea is for the player to be able to go and try out different weapons, different ships, so on and so forth. If you're buying a ship item or something, oh, I want to buy this power plant versus this other power plant, you want to be able to go and test it and see if it fits your play style.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

Not at the moment. Some of the feedback we got was that we should really be at least telling players that they might need a helmet.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Well, yeah, I was waiting to bring that up, but I was just noticing in that moment that Sam seemed to be possessing some knowledge already that I need to go to my inventory to do this stuff.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

So right now, we encourage the player to buy a helmet, and maybe in a future iteration, we can sort of incorporate that into part of the flow. But yeah, Sam's got special knowledge.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

During a summit, Chris and myself and other directors, we had a very long conversation in regards to what the final new player experience will look like. The bare-bones aspect that we're building here, it might be that we start at a different place besides your hab, but we're teaching you the same exact things. We're teaching you the very basics. And then from there, again, we wanted it to be kind of a small bite-sized gameplay and then unleash the player into the world because, again, we don't know what you're doing. It could be that you're going through this experience just to meet up with some friends, and we don't want to keep you from that. But we want to at least be able to, if the player needs to have their hand held a little bit, help them out.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

Yeah, so previously hints would be kind of at the bottom, in the center. We've got some tech which kind of dresses them up a little bit, moves them up and to the right. And just below that we've got the new contextual hint system.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

That's one of the things we need to fix. We know that basically the old mobiGlass needs to burn in hell. And then with the visor, it's being worked on and being adjusted.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Todd, would you just look right into the camera and tell mobiGlass what you think of it?

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

It needs to burn in hell. Very, very deep hell.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

So for the new player experience, we've basically gifted the player a rented Pisces. The reason we do that is so they have a suitable ship to learn in. We don't completely lock them out from any purchased ships. They get unlocked at the end of the new player experience. But for the very first flight, and if you want to, the flights subsequent to that, the player's got a nice ship. It's easy to fly. It's very small. So it's kind of suitable for the very first experience.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Well, it's whenever, because I would go over to James's desk and he would be getting it ready, and so when I was doing reviews on it and everything like that, it's always Hangar 3. I don't know why, but...

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Well, he's running his own private server. There's no other player.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Correct. But no matter what, it's always Hangar 3. So if I was doing it at James's desk, even if we tried out different ships in the beginning, it was always Hangar 3.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

But on live servers?

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

It'll be whatever.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And people are like, they don't know why? No, it's part of what happens when you build a systemic universe. You're building all these individual systems.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Well, Hangar 1 and 2 could be the oversized hangars. I don't know how this one is exactly set up. So it might be that those are the extra-large hangars that are set up.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

Well, this is why we teach them to hold the Z key down and just look around before they actually take off. Because for Todd, it's always Hangar 3, but for the public, it could be anything. So it could be the front door, in which case you see it fine. But if not, if you've got a top-loading hangar, then you need to know to look up.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Well, it's LODs. It's basically, we have things off in the distance that will show designer or kind of arted boxes. It basically helps us run a consistent frame rate. So he was just going through and turning that stuff off, so it actually gave a decent-looking skyline.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Represents what the player would see.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Yeah, exactly. Versus what he's seeing in a dev build.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

So they've left their hangar and we're giving them just a basic flight around Area 18. It's nighttime at the moment, so you don't get to see very much, but the idea is that you get an idea of how to fly your ship, because this is the first time that the player's been in their ship. So the path is pretty straight. You can see objective markers appearing, giving them new places to go to. So we keep them pretty much in line, so they're not appearing off to the side and you're having to sort of swerve your way around. But we're also popping up hints that give them basic controls. So at the start it'll say, hey, you need to raise your landing gear, and this is your throttle and how to adjust your speed, and just various basic hints like that, just so they get an idea of how to fly.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

No. Basically because whenever we do the testing, it's always spinning up a new server. So I would always get to Baijini Point and it's completely dark, completely black. So it's difficult to see. So we still need to work through it. Some issues.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

No. Well, sorry, it should be that, because with the German keyboards, Z and Y are flipped, but it should just be the placement of where it's actually at on the keyboard; it should be a Y instead of Z.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And the text will reflect that?

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Yes, it should. If it doesn't, then please let us know and we'll fix it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We're literally teaching the process.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Yeah. So again, for this, Sam's going through and trying to make it look pretty, versus as an average player, you're going to be looking at it from your cockpit. You're going to be trying to speed through it, I think, or do a speed run for it. And usually our reviews take 30 minutes, and maybe 10 of those are calling out notes and talking about any sort of blockers or anything like that. So I think James and I can get through this in what, 15 minutes, if that?

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

Probably. Pretty quick.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

So it's usually a pretty quick experience. So for example, here, right now you have a whole bunch of QT markers associated with this. Again, one of the things that we were trying to do was strip away all of these, or have it be that you didn't have enough fuel to fly over there. So then he would have to come here, refuel, and then things are open to the player. There's other aspects in regards to the amount of missions that are shown to the player and everything.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

Yeah, we were conscious, once the player finishes the tutorial, of the missions that would be available immediately afterwards, and while we couldn't get to all of them, we've cut down the number and we've hopefully cut down some of the more difficult ones for new players. So they should have a more suitable selection than they would previously, let's say.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

If we talk about this, let's say you are a new player, or maybe you've played this one patch. If we do any sort of resets or wipes or anything like that, the idea would be after you finish the new player experience, that gets you to the same baseline that everybody else starts the game at if they don't choose the new player experience and they just started and everything's reset. It gets everybody the same baseline. And so again, for our missions, we want to make sure that they branch out. It's not like you get 40 choices in the very beginning. You'll have three, and then you do one, and then now that opens up two more and now you have five available. So it's slowly doling those things out.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

That is the contextual control aspects that we were talking about, and also part of the contextual hints. So because there's certain things that we wanted to teach or reinforce to the player all the time. Again, if you haven't played the game in a while or you're coming back fresh, then basically this allows us to gently remind you.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

It does. Unfortunately, it does. So right now, this is what we have. And we will continue to make it better, but we will roll this out to different landing zones. Obviously, from there, we'll also look at feedback on, if people are clubbing the baby seals over and over and over again, then we will institute other things to block that. We had talked about putting it on a unique planet that nobody could get to and nobody could QT to. It's its own space. We had thought about that. But that's not our game. And so we had those conversations and talked about it, but it just didn't feel right. So this is what we have. And so we need to build and tune for a game. Obviously I think the new player experience at Lorville versus the new player experience at Orison will be a little bit different, but we're just trying to teach you the main concepts.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Yes. The intention is to take it to those multiple landing zones.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Yeah, that's a little bit more difficult, and I think that's something that James and Dan and Kristoff and I will need to sit down and really go through and talk about, because right now in Pyro...

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Well, basically it teaches you to store your ship. And then James can go into more details on that.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

So when the player lands, they get out of their ship and you're sort of asked to store it. And as soon as you store your ship, you've landed at Baijini Point, you've learned all kinds of stuff, and that's the ending point.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Yeah, so it allows you to go through and read about any of the things that we teach the player, so you can refer back to it. And obviously, in case you missed something or want to read up more information on that, then this allows you to do that.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

One thing we do throughout the new player experience is point players towards the journal, because the journal is a really good source of information, not just during the new player experience, but throughout. It will teach you about law and crime stats and all that kind of stuff. So pointing players to that early on gives them a tool which they can use throughout their time with Star Citizen.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Yeah, and basically, S42 is building a new mobiGlass framework. We'll take that framework and adjust it from a visual standpoint, but then continue to build on that for the Persistent Universe needs. And so basically we just need to wait, but we felt like the new player experience and what we were able to develop right now was good enough. Obviously there's still some bugs that we need to work through, but it was good enough to introduce and make sure that we can actually lower the learning curve that new players run into all the time.

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

I don't think that will make 3.19, but it's a possibility for a future patch.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Until then, we'll have to rely on our wonderful community and the guides and whatnot.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

I think the other thing that needs to be stated there is on the front end, there's an actual button there. It's a hyperlink that will take you out and it'll take you to the guide on the Roberts Space Industries website, and you'll be able to request a guide if you want.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Well, we can do it real quick, I think. Taking it to the different landing zones, taking certain feedback that we acquire that we need to basically flesh out more and adjust that. And then long term, it'd be thinking about, okay, do we need to do short little mission training for combat, whether that be FPS or ship? Do we need to do it for EVA? Do we need to do it for missile locks? So on and so forth. Or do we need to do it for mining or salvaging or any of our gameplay loops? And do we do these small little snippets of missions that you can load up and you can kind of rinse and repeat over and over again?

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Like a combat mission and then a cargo delivery mission kind of thing?

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

It could be even smaller than that. Like, okay, I want to practice missile lock. So, all right, spawn the scenario, even probably via sim pod, like I'm sitting there and I can practice, okay, this is how I do missile lock, or I want to shoot down a missile. Okay, you've got a missile coming in, shoot that down, or shoot down three of them in X amount of time. So just ways for you to harden your skills and work on very specific scenarios that might not spawn themselves unless it's in battle or something like that.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

So, yes, we talked about it, and that was one of the initial pitches that I did, that it was sim pod only. And then after you get out of it, now you're in a safe area. Obviously, there's certain aspects, like getting out of the hangar and crashing your ship and then going to the medical center and so on and so forth. There were certain things there that were not new-user friendly. But at the same time, we are an MMO, and we want to make sure that we don't isolate the players from their friends or from other things that they could experience on their journey on the new player experience.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So there's a certain amount of chaos that comes with the Persistent Universe, and we're not totally 100% against chaos. We like that emergent nature, how other players affect things.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Exactly. I think if we teach them, hey, this is how it works in a vacuum, then it's not us. And so the most vacuum aspects that we did was, all right, this is the habs. Now, it might be that in the future, you're on a ship going to whatever major landing zone is going to be your home. And then at that point in time, you get off and we still teach you how to get to your hab or away from your hab. So there are certain things that we know we need to train. It's just going to be how do we go about it and do it. But I think a lot of the work that James and Sam and the rest of the team have done on creating this is basically laying the foundation for anything that we do in the future.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

I guess for me, it's been more a labor of love. I did the initial pitch of this two years ago. So for me, this is something that I've been wanting to see for quite a while.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Now, that's not to say that this took two years of continuous work. This has to go into the schedule and into the resource pool.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Yeah, and there's certain fundamental things that we wanted in place first before we would do it. It's just that there's other higher priorities or there's other things, but this allowed us to align. Everything comes in line and we understand that, okay, certain features... because for example, the hints and the training, that was on the actor team, but they had other priorities that they needed to do. And so this allowed us to go through and get it done. But the initial thought process of it and the initial document that I wrote was, yeah, about two years ago.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I mention that because there's a misapprehension that all aspects of a game are worked on continuously at the same time in conjunction, and stuff like this. They hear, oh, you're working on this, whatever it is, in one month, and it's been eight months, so they've been working on it for eight months, and that's not true. Teams get pulled off. There are dependencies that come up. We need new tech to be developed before we can continue our work. There's any number of reasons. People depart the project. New people join the project with new ideas, and we rethink, oh, well, that's a better idea than what we were doing. There's no end to the reasons why development bobs and weaves. And so that's why I always say the only constant in game development is change.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

Yeah, from James's standpoint, I think you started on this, what, three, four months ago?

James Kay · Lead Content Designer

Yeah, late last year.

Todd Papy · Game Director, Star Citizen

So he was the one that did the initial mission and then called out to MFT, saying, hey, we need this, we need this, we need this. And then it'd be myself and Phil and Jonathan from a production standpoint going around chasing up people, saying, okay, we need this feature. When is this coming online? There was some new tech that had to be created for a mission that starts basically when the player initiates into the world. There were certain fundamental things that were not there, and then there were definitely some gotcha moments when we were going through and we were like, oh, we missed this, or oh, we need this. And with a lot of these things, for the most part, the way that we do our feedback or our playtests, we do a lot of those via PTU and Evocati playing, and so it's the hardcore of the hardcore. But we knew that for this feature, those people wouldn't be doing that or needing that. So we did internal playtests and we watched them.