Testers kept telling me my game was "missing something." It wasn't missing. I just locked it in a room they never walked into.
For like three weeks straight I got the same feedback over and over for my demo. Fun, works fine, but something's missing. No meat to it.
And it drove me insane because I knew the meat was in there. I spent months on it.
Quick context, it's a dark fantasy shop sim. Core loop is buy stock, put it on the shelf, set your prices, make money. Pretty standard. But I didn't want to stop there so I kept piling stuff on top. Rarer items on your shelf pull in more thieves. You're never forced to sell your whole shopping list, you sell what you feel like selling. There's contracts. And the thing I'm honestly most proud of in the whole game, world events.
Most shop sims just do that little daily price wiggle, five percent up or down, whatever. I wanted events that actually move the whole economy. So sometimes every alchemy ingredient goes 50% off and if you're smart you buy in bulk right then. Or a war kicks off and weapon demand shoots up, but good luck if you didn't already stock up because now your suppliers jacked their prices too, while all of your customers are buying only weapons. Or there's a witch hunt edict and these aggressive NPCs start showing up and scaring your customers off. Small ones, big ones, price stuff, straight up shortages. This was the system I was proudest of, the one I really wanted people to run into.
So why was nobody feeling any of it?
I went back and watched the recordings of people playing. And I just watched them walk right past everything. Two hours in on some of them and still nothing, no events, no contracts, none of it ever fired.
Because I'd stuck all of it behind the tutorial!!!
Here's the dumb part. I was terrified of overwhelming new players so I set the tutorial up to walk you through the basics before it unlocked the deeper systems. Sounds reasonable right. Except every single tester ignored the tutorial. All of them. Clicked through it like it was spam, treated it as a chore, and ignored very last steps at all, and because of that my entire world event system just sat there behind a door none of them ever bothered to open. One of my favorite features basically didn't exist for the people playing.
The thing I added specifically so players wouldn't feel lost is the exact reason they never found the good part. Still annoyed at myself about it honestly.
So I ripped the tutorial apart. Now it teaches you the couple of things you actually need and then it shuts up. Everything else you pick up as you go, through the quests and contracts while you're actually playing instead of reading about systems you're not even allowed to touch yet.
Anyway the takeaway I keep coming back to is that caring too much about the player messed me up almost as bad as not caring would have. I thought I was protecting people. I was basically hiding my own game from them.
Don't gate your best stuff behind something people skip. Lesson very much learned.