The first step to resolving a problem is understanding it and confessing that the problem might be on your side (as much as it may hurt), instead of blaming the bad environment. Your game likely enough is worth being played and provides for some fun, but you have to encourage potential customers to choose your product over anything else they could do to kill time. Every game is competing and can not simply expect, or even demand audience. This already starts with your hub. If there is no download link, your game should provide a hosting schedule, which can be spotted right away (it should be placed in a prominent position). You want to be customer friendly, you want your potential clientèle to know if they are going to have a chance and even play the game right away. If you don't, they'll judge the hub entry as dead and leave, at which point you likely won't see them again. Do not forget to mention a time-zone though, as not everybody lives at the same place. While this is a nice start, it certainly isn't enough. Provide a summary of your game with such essential information as the basic game style (Isometric/Top-view, Turn-based/Real time, On the map battles/Battle-Screen, Singleplayer/Multiplayer), followed by the games' unique selling proposition (yes, players are going to need a real reason to play your game instead of the thousand others out there). After the summary, you likely want to go for a more detailed description of the world, it's story, the battle system, skill progression, everything that might help the reader to envision your project. On the other side, your moderation team, or the game's rule set should not be listed on the hub. These are irrelevant to decide if a game could be fun or not and that very decision is what the hub entry should influence. Some nice screenshoots and a video can work wonders for this purpose as well.

Now, when a customer finally decided to join your game, ensure that the graphical user interface blends in well with the game and target audience alike. This already starts with something as basic as character creation. If the first thing to greet a player is a pop-up, your game lost valuable points with the more advanced customer. Embedding a neatly designed, browser based character generation into a child element (yes, the whole game window should be filled with the character generation and you should not see a 'Stat' for an non existent character) looks professional and isn't as tricky as most people seem to think. Another important point to note is validating player input. Do not ask them to follow certain guidelines if the game doesn't check on them afterwards, because a lot of players are going to purposely go against your advise. Never put trust into receiving proper data, but always parse the information you received and act accordingly.

Finally, your new player has decided for her avatar and is ready to venture onwards! After all this trouble and effort, the player doesn't want to invest more time into reading through lengthy help files, or even worse would want to click her way through an aggressive alert spam tutorial. A good system is easy to pick up and hard to master, which is exactly how your interface should behave. In order to guide your player through the task of getting used to the interface, don't send them from NPC to NPC, basically cutting a lengthy help file into small brackets, but provide them with a selected few simple tasks (a little on-screen text works wonders in such a case) to master. Try to disguise this by embedding it into the story and allow for easy success and progression. On this note, a general rule of thumb is that a player should be able to access every main game feature without moving her hands too much. Make good use of both mouse click events, as well as the keyboard, but keep in mind that your set-up should prevent accidents. It would be bad to walk to a place and to use an object through the same left mouse click, because you could easily miss and use something you didn't want to. It would be better to use the left mouse event for walking, the right one to interact and both at the same time to investigate something. This way you can not trigger the wrong action unintentionally, but have three main functions bound to a single hand. Even though you're going to have put much thought into developing a decent set of macros, never forget to include the option of customisation. Yes, theoretically somebody could do this (to a certain degree) through editing the skin, but that wouldn't be customer friendly at all. Score some points by offering a neat little (browser based) table, that allows for simple association of macros to functionality in your game and don't forget to embed this in the main window's child element.

Non of this makes up for lacking content or possibly encountering errors though, so try to ensure that you can provide your customer with countless happy hours of flawless fun before releasing a game (or submitting it to a banner guild). Where your beta testers may endure some situations, a casual player likely won't.


If you can get your player this far, you have a decent chance to see them again the next day!