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. 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. In battle 3 the player is tasked with creating a power up by swiping a gem to create a 4 match. 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.Īnother unexpected issue was the power ups throwing the battles off. 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. When the system is fully on rails the green tank’s random gem destruction throws everything for a loop. In the early version the player would activate the green tank’s ability and then go off rails.

You see, the green tank has an ability which affects a random gem. 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.Īn unexpected result of the FTUE becoming fully on rails was that a couple of the tanks would break the FTUE. We also noticed that players were not engaging with the Training Missions in early iterations. After Soft Launch and reviewing the data, we noticed we had heavy player churn at the locations where the FTUE went off-rails. The earliest version of the FTUE wasn’t fully on rails and ended after the 5th battle. Tools Used: Unity, Excel, Perforce, Brick, Visual Studio (JSON), proprietary tools

Atari battle tanks