Space 4X/Grand Strategy Game Alliance Of The Sacred Suns Will Have A Streamlined Tutorial After Player Feedback

Developer KatHawk Studios is working on Alliance Of The Sacred Suns, a 4X strategy game with grand strategy and RPG elements set in the interstellar empire “in the brink of collapse”. Even in space, no one can escape the bickering and feuding of noble houses.

The game is published by Hooded Horse, a publisher with a very specific niche- strategy games on PC.

In the most recent devblog post for Alliance Of The Sacred Suns, the developers have updated the community on how the game will approach tutorials. Any sort of strategy game has a learning curve, but based on feedback by players from its recent third beta test, the current tutorial system was not up for the job.

The previous implementation of a tutorial system was, as admitted by the devs, buggy, but also requires so much reading.

KatHawk Studios have moved to a different way to onboard players, taking suggestions from player feedback. The game will now have tooltips, an encyclopedia and a helper UI that pops up the first few times with the option for the player to turn them off later.

Also, the hand-holding tutorial has now been scrapped entirely. Instead, there is a “quick start” sequence you can play that walks you through the game concepts, and gently guides you in what’s essentially tutorial tasks- initiatives. Initiatives can be completed at any time, but are there so that players learning the ropes have an idea what they should be doing.

Strategy games need some sort of tutorial, but they also shouldn’t be restricting players from doing things their way- which is the appeal of strategy games to begin with. Learning through failure is fun, but the game must ensure that it has made it clear what the players should learn from it so it’s not an exercise of frustration.

Or in the devs’ own words from the post:

“In this genre, people don’t like their hand held, but they do want to have all the tools available to learn at their own pace, so we’re going to listen to the people!”

The full blog post goes in further lengths on what other areas that have been improved upon since the previous beta test. Though it mostly makes sense to the folks who have played the beta.

Alliance Of The Sacred Stars will release sometime this year on PC (Steam).