I worked tonight on fixing the tutorial. Previously I would give several pages of tutorial explaining movement, momentum, pausing and resuming, all sorts of stuff. But I noticed that whenever I would show it to people they would start to read the first paragraph, then just skip through the rest because there was way too much text. When that would happen I would instruct them to exit the tutorial level and open a combat level. Then I would point out three things: Click and drag the green circle to move the waypoint. Click on the plus sign to add new waypoints. Click the play button to have your ships start moving, click it again to pause your ships.
With those instructions most people were able to start moving and figure things out, and in fact, most of them didn’t even need to be told how to add waypoints. So I decided that I would simplify the in game tutorial to three or four very short paragraphs. So I spent the evening laying the groundwork to show the simple tutorial messages. I think it will really help, but it’s still irritating how much time it can take just to set things up so you can show and hide the tutorial at the right times.