Rope Rescue (2012)
Rope Rescue is a mobile puzzle game that launched on iOS and Android in 2012.
Connect all the wheels with the minimum amount of rope to free the caged baby birds.
Awards
Top 10 Paid game (General and Puzzle) on iOS (2012)
GameIS (Game Association of Israel) Best Design award 2012
My Role
I was the 2D game artist on the project. While I did little design, this game is what shaped my desire to move away from game art and into UX and tutorial design.
Lessons Learned
UX Design
At the time I was a game developer and artist. I produced a lot of downloadable, online and mobile games as either the artist or programmer, or both. But there wasn't a lot of focus on actual game or tutorial design.
GDC 2012
In 2012 my husband and I attended GDC to promote the game we just launched with our publisher Chillingo (EA). It was a pretty successful game and we were proud of our first game created together as an independent team. I happened to attend George Fan's talk: How I Got My Mom to Play Plants Vs Zombies, and my mind was blown.
He laid out the case for good tutorial design, something we paid little attention to in our own game. From that time on I knew I wanted to learn more about this, and focus on it in my game dev career.
Basic Tutorial Errors
For Rope Rescue, and too many others I had worked on previously, the tutorial was an afterthought. It was either a series of written instructions players skipped over, or a set of beginner puzzles used to teach everything at once. We used a combination of both.
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We handheld too much on the first level without building a case for the reason you take that action. We show the correct path but the connection to the goal (touch all wheels to unlock the cage) wasn't well communicated. We instead wrote what players needed to know, instead of showing them. A better way would have been to visually call out when each wheel was activated by a rope and relating it to a change in the cage state.
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We pointed out things that needed no explanation, like that knives are probably dangerous.
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We made fail states more annoying by giving players sound effects and animation that were unneeded and unpleasant. When someone loses, they know they lost. No need to further accentuate it!
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Our HUD was fairly ineffective. The information displayed at the top could have been better implemented in the game itself by having the rope change visual states. When working with puzzle games, players' attention is on the task at hand. Making them look elsewhere for information is a hard ask.
Repercussions for Education Games
Tutorial systems are key for teaching with games. Many of these best practices are essential for good instructional and educational game design.
