In light of the recent annual IGF controversy/drama going around, I figure I should expand and clarify a point i've continually made every time the yearly IGF drama comes up. Simply put, if judges stop playing your game after 5 minutes, then there's something wrong with the first 5 minutes of your game. This is some advice for future IGF hopefuls, or, well, anyone looking to release a game to the public really.

First point: People (including IGF Judges and potential fans/players/customers) are not gonna change to fit the needs of your game. So, its up to you to take a step back and look at what you can do to your game to make it fit the people playing it. I understand that you don't want to change your game drastically or sacrifice artistic integrity or do shit in your game purely for the purpose of making it "accessible", and, well, the good news is you don't have to! Nothing about the rest of your game needs to change if you focus on making a stronger intro (although often a better intro lets you do stuff later on you weren't able to before, more on this later in the post).

Second point: A good intro isn't just there to make your game appealing to competitions, its there to help your game do better when its finally released, whether or not you are a free web game or a commerical game. Yes, there ARE exceptions of games that do well in spite of a bad intro, but the key part there is "in spite of". Minecraft, Twilight Princess, and other recent Zelda games all have pretty terrible (or for minecraft, nonexistant) intros, yet nobody claims that that's a GOOD thing. Don't expect to be the next Minecraft, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment. 

Third point: It's not that difficult to polish up your intro to acceptable levels. Most of the suggesstions I have here are gonna seem REALLY obvious, and well, they are. They aren't difficult decisions, they aren't sacrificing any sort of artistic integrity, they don't require you to change the rest of your game, and unless you want to make it absolutely perfect it really doesn't take that long. Yet, commercial games still ship with absolutely terrible intros, and new devs still constantly make the same sort of mistakes here.



So, first off what makes a BAD intro? This is an immensely easier question to answer than what makes a GOOD intro, so it's here first.

- A giant wall of text. This seems obvious, but games still do that. Nobody wants to read a giant wall of text in the start of a game, and if you make it optional people WILL skip it expecting to be able to learn for themselves. The same applies to a long cutscene before the game begins, though a cutscene can be more easily made compelling than a wall of text.

- Starting right off using lingo and names that only exist in the game's universe without letting the player have a chance to explore for themselves first. If you're intro starts off right away with "QUICK! Palnesto! The smonbloxians are attacking with their phidgleams of mumbaxto! Attack them with your akkalmint ray to harvest their bamkai energy for your plebo meter!" it just overwhelms the player. Yet I still play commercial games that do this, and it makes it really hard to "get into" a game when it starts right off with a cutscene or message that starts throwing words at me and expects me to remember them before I even have a chance to figure out what the controls are. This isn't a death sentence for an intro, and it CAN be done well, but its so commonly and easy to mess up I felt I should mention it here. If you really want your game to start this way, at least give the player a short amount of time to play with the controls before throwing plot stuff at him.

- Repetition. Don't make the player fight 10 of the same type of enemy in a row in your intro stage, after the first few a player is naturally going to think "is this all?" or "uggg when do I fight something new?", same goes for an arcadey game with a bunch of short levels in the beginning. I played one arcadey puzzley game for IGF judging where the first level had 1 blue guy in it, then the second had two blue guys in it, the third had three, the fourth had four, then the fifth added a RED guy (1 red 1 blue), then the next did 2 red 2 blue, then 3 red 3 blue, then 4 red 4 blue, then it added a GREEN guy. The difference between 2 and 4 is minimal in terms of what it asks the player to do, and it could have ramped up a LOT faster with less hammering-in of the mechanics and been much better for it. No getting bored in the intro with minimal changes that didn't add much each time, faster to get into the "real" puzzles/levels.

- No intro, suddenly complicated mechanics. I played one game which was some weird simulation thing, where you were supposed to be able to program AI's with a weird abstracted interface and they would walk around and do stuff. I assume the game was pretty neat if you could figure it out (screenshots and trailer certainly made it look neat), but instead it thrusts you right into a really complicated game with a complicated and unpolished interface that was just... impossible to figure out, and a lack of feedback made it not feel worth it to  keep trying at it.

- Terrible controls. Nothing makes me not want to continue playing a game more than a terrible (/unresponsive/buggy) control scheme that actively hinders my attempts to progress. QWOP is an exception, don't use that to justify terrible controls please.

Examples of games with bad intros? The only ones I can list are ones that are popular DESPITE a bad intro, since most of the terrible offenders tend to... not become popular... Minecraft is one. No instructions, requires a wiki to play (good luck if you want to play in fullscreen and only have 1 monitoe HA). Its popular because it does become good once you learn it, and there's shitloads of videos of people doing amazing things in it. Zelda Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword also had pretty terrible intros. Really excessively long plot-focused intros with a shitload of text and weird fetch quests and minigames that aren't ever used later in the game. The point of Zelda is swordfighting and dungeons, so why wait AN HOUR to even give you the training sword? Why do I have to herd goats around TWICE when there aren't even any goats (or goat-like enemies) anywhere else in the game? If these weren't branded as Zelda games, there'd be absolutely no incentive to keep playing the game after such a terrible intro.

Hey Link, Lets Herd Some Goats