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MoneyMitch26
MHCP Partner
22 days ago

DevLog #3 - 26th March 2026 - Onboarding Trailer

Hey! For those that don’t know me, my names Mitch and I make indie games on horizon worlds.

This week I focused on the ‘first-time-user-experience’ of the world. From chatting with a mentor in the creator program, I learnt a huge tip for onboarding new players: The loading screen!

Horizon Worlds lets you upload a custom video to play while your world loads. Since players will have to stare at that for 20-30 seconds while your world loads, that absolutely counts as the 1st 30 seconds they experience of your game. So like how YouTube video creators need to over index their efforts on the 1st 30 seconds of their content (especially the 1st 3-5 seconds), this should apply to this loading trailer for the world. Imagine losing players before the world has even loaded…

So this week my efforts were mostly outside the game editor, and instead working in vector graphic and video editing software, creating overlay tiles to appear on top of my existing trailer. I introduced 3 onboarding tiles that illustrate the gameplay loops, reduced down to be as simple and understandable as possible.

  1. Gameloop 1 (Every 1-10 seconds) Collect trash
  2. Gameloop 2 (Every 10-30 seconds) Collect ducks
  3. Gameloop 3 (Every 1-5 minutes) Claim pets with perk upgrades to reach distant zones

The bonus benefit of having to refine clarity around the core gameloop system, is that it helped me think about future balance changes. For example, I realise the trash collection and duck collection are currently on par in terms of loop timing + action. In a future update (likely next week) I plan to:

  1. Shorten the trash loop time, by increasing trash volume + default carry capacity, maybe reduce value of each;
  2. Increase the duck loop time, by having less ducks, 3 per tide level instead of current system of increasing per level; and
  3. Have the distant zone more visible as the tide goes down, to intrigue players to want to get further in the map, which requires pet duck upgrades.

That's what I’ve been working on this week. Wbu?

 

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