It is amazing how every person has a different playstyle and has a very unique set of expectations.

When designing and tweaking the mechanics of Mines of Volantis, it seemed to me it would be obvious for players what they would have to do in the game. For the fuel mechanic, I made the fuel drain passively to pressure the player into getting to move and mine for resources to refill this bar. It all felt very balanced when playing myself and also for the regular playtesters.

The problem here was that the game was being played by experienced gamers that knew exactly what they had to do and directly drilled through the surface and strip mined the map in the most efficient way possible. Players with less experience or which are unknown with this genre felt very rushed by the game and didn't feel like they got the time they needed to figure out the mechanics. In one case, a player did not realize he could drill through a different kind of block and get a valuable resource from that, and frequently got lost in a maze of tunnels while franticly finding his way back before the fuel bar reached zero and the game would end.

This tells me that even though mechanics would be obvious to most players, others need a little bit more of help to get on their way. For the game this means I will have to look into extending the current tutorial or add some kind of hints ingame to make it playable for players of different levels of experience.