Teaching Springfall without a manual

The first hour of a colony sim has two ways to fail. Explain everything and the player closes the window. Explain nothing and they stare at a settlement that is quietly starving.

Springfall’s guide aims between the two, and the design question that decided it was not what to teach. It was when.

A presence, not a pop-up

The guide begins when the player speaks to something in the world, not when a window appears. It has no name and it points at the part of the interface the current lesson is about, with a pulsing outline, then gets out of the way.

Skipping is allowed, and a skip counts. A lesson the player dismissed is treated as finished and is not offered again. The guide can also be switched off entirely, and that choice belongs to the player rather than to the save, so a new colony does not turn it back on.

Two kinds of lesson

Some lessons are a path: do this, then this, in order. Others are moments, small cards that appear when the game notices the player has met something for the first time.

Both kinds are data, not code written per lesson. Adding a lesson is adding a description of what to point at and what counts as having done it.

Measuring the clock first

The guided path takes somewhere between 25 and 40 minutes at normal speed. Several of the game’s own pressures arrive inside that window: the first hunger, the first level, the first visitor, the first threat. Reading the game’s timing against the guide’s length showed that new lessons could not simply be queued after the path. They had to interleave with it.

That produced two rules, both now in the runner. A moment waits for the current lesson to finish rather than cutting into it, and two moments cannot arrive back to back. The gap is measured from the last moment, not from any lesson, because measured from any lesson it would starve moments for the entire path.

Making sure the first lesson has something to teach

A guide that says “gather some berries” is no use if the nearest berries are 26 metres away and the nearest stone is 41. The world now guarantees a minimum of a few of the basic resources within walking distance of where a new colony starts. It adds only what is missing and does nothing on a loaded save, so it cannot place the same bush twice.

What is not covered here

The lessons themselves are intentionally left out. Part of the point is finding things. The mechanism is in and tested; the later lessons are still being written.