The process of getting a new player into your game and making that process an enjoyable experience can be the difference between success and failure for your game. If you make a game for a publisher, you can assume there will be a milestone that involves the onboarding. Let’s take a look at how GalCiv IV does it and what has changed since GalCiv III.
Title Screen

We went through many iterations for the title screen. How many buttons should there be? Which buttons should be where? How should color be used?
I would argue that we could have dispensed with the Exit button in the menu here and instead had some sort of X at the top right or something. And we might still want to do that so we could fit a Tutorial button there. Let us know in the comments what you think.
New Game

There was a lot of kvetching around this screen (by me) until we got to this version. It’s still not ideal (the tiny tiny scrollbar on the right is a problem). But it is a huge step up from the past. Here it is very clear what you’re getting and it’s an enjoyable experience.
Customize

GalCiv III included vast customization options, but they were somewhat buried. This time, we wanted to get these features front and center. That said, still not ready for prime time yet. The drop-downs need a a tooltip to explain what these other traits mean.

But again, the player is being guided into what their civilization is about.
Galaxy
This screen should be called “Galaxy”. Now, ideally, we would have fun, visual ways of changing the galaxy size, the size of your starting sector, and so on. In fact, all these options, ideally, will get some sort of visual cues rather than be just drop-downs.

In short, this screen is not ready yet. But when done, this is setting up the map.
Opponents
So now we’re picking opponents. The point of this screen is to allow the player to really get to know who the various species of the galaxy are. There’s no real need to show your player in this screen so it’ll likely be going.

The main difference in GalCiv IV is that we have a lot more screens than we did in previous games. The reason for this is onboarding. We know from player research that many players enjoy the setup process and that this can be a fun experience.
The entry into the game
Let's get into the game. We need paragraphs here instead of a wall of text, and this should have VO reading this. The goal is to get the player invested in their new civilization.

In a few years, we hope that the text to speech tech will be such that people’s custom civilizations could have auto-generated VO. We’re still far from that.
So what do you think? What can games do to give you a better first impression? Let us know in the comments.
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Galactic Civilizations IV Dev Journals