JusTiCe8 Hi! If you're referring to instructions in the Bonesweeper prototype, improved onboarding would not benefit me in any way. My plans for onboarding in Fossil Sweeper (the larger game I am working on that the prototype was initial exploratory work for) are to do proper interactive tutorialisation, but in the meantime, I will definitely be relying on text based instructions for interim onboarding once I've done the upcoming UI overhaul I mentioned in video 44. So far, people with access to playable builds of Fossil Sweeper have been getting by without any instructions at all.
The prototype will never be updated to match the larger game. It is not intended to be a demo. Once the larger game ships, its purpose will be to serve as a piece of historic context showing how exploratory work in a prototype informs production decisions on a larger game. As another example, when packaging the "jam prototype" version of Hive Time, it was important that many bugs remain unaddressed and the changes I did make not go beyond work that was intended during the jam period - the whole point of publishing the jam prototype was to show how far the game had come after the jam.
For the full game that I am working on, if a player doesn't enjoy playing Minesweeper style puzzles for the sake of playing puzzles, or if a player doesn't find discovering new skeletons and collecting new specimens to display in their museum motivating, then they are probably not part of my target audience. As a general philosophy, I think it is important to make sure I do what I can to help people avoid playing my games if they're not likely to enjoy them (this strategy has been beneficial to me on past projects and has helped me avoid spending time/attention on people who want something other than what I'm making. A nice example of this is reflected in my experiences exhibiting a text-based game at PAX Aus.
Hope all that sheds some light!
