The first few mintues of your game make a crazy amount of difference. Getting Over It worked because people knew what they were getting into. In the opening dev explains the point of the game and what’s about to happen.

He tells you that this is a game about the frustration of starting over. You’re going to lose progress, get frustrated, and if you’re having a bad day you might want to play something else. This sets the expectations perfectly.

I’ve mentioned before that A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum nearly closed off-Broadway. It’s relevant here too, so bear with me. Audiences didn’t seem to find it funny, an obvious death sentence for a musical comedy. The creative team couldn’t figure it out, nothing was working. Then Jerome Robbins came in and told them, “You need to tell the audience what to expect, what the show is about.”

Sondheim wrote a new opening, “Comedy Tonight”. In it he tells the audience exactly what to expect: Something appealing, something appalling, something for everone a comedy tonight! Nothing of kings! Nothing of crowns! Bring on the lovers, liars and clowns!

Nothing else abotu the show changed, but suddenly all the following scenes caught uproarious laughter from the well-prepared audience. The result was one of the longest running comedies in Broadway history.

Back to games. One of my friends is working on an indie project, a horror game loosely inspired by fixed camera classics. It’s all about creating disempowerment through limitations, limited angles of visibility and sharply limited resources. He wanted you to embrace the limitations and make the most of what little you had.

He needed an opening that would hook the player’s interest, explain why the game was special, and correctly set player expectations.

This is what we came up with for his next test:

Start on a black screen… Then text fades in.

𝘐𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘦, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘣𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 3 𝘣𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘴.

𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦.

^ Before then, the idea was that bullets would be scarce and in short supply, but you’d still have access to them regularly. He’d never thought that there would be only 3 of them.

However, this hook has now inspired him to design the game around exactly 3 bullets, and the various times the game would tempt you to fire them.