Pitwall news

In order to lower the learning curve of the game, I've done some research on why and where people get stuck when starting to play the game. I came to the conclusion that the lack of information, and on the other side the information overload on all the screens were the reason that most people stopped playing before properly getting started.

To fix this I've spent quite some time on adding information to the help section. All the pages now contain the most basic information, and they are styled in a wiki kind of way so that the information is easy to spot. More information will be added in the future as the game is being developed.

Another common problem was that people just didn't know where to start. The only real way to fix this was to create a tutorial for the game. New players will now be helped by the tutorial which shows up at the very top of the page. The tutorial is interactive, so it will only advance when the members perform the right actions. Those actions include (but are not limited to): founding their team, entering a competition, signing suppliers, signing staff/drivers, starting negotiations with sponsors, creating/producing parts, etc.
Once the tutorial has been completed the team will have a basic car that can be taken to the track immediately. To accomplish this I've made some changes to the way the new team bonus works. Persons will now join immediately and new teams won't have to wait for the person to choose the team. Suppliers will also sign immediately and there's no need to wait for the next hour update anymore. And finally parts are produced immediately as well, no more waiting for the next hour update either.

All of these actions are done to reduce the number of people who run away screaming from the complexity of the game. Because I couldn't know which members didn't finish their basic setting up of the team, I've enabled the tutorial for everyone. You can always go through it to know what is going on in it, but obviously if you already have a team you won't be able to go through it in the interactive way. You can always end the tutorial by clicking "End tutorial" on the right top corner.