We watched new players lose before they drew a single line

Crazy Dispatch is a game about drawing a route under a moving car. You drag a line from the car to its pin, the car follows it, and wherever two routes cross the line turns into a ramp.

That works well once you know it. For a brand-new player it had a problem: the cars did not wait.

What was going wrong

In the second tutorial, two cars roll in from the edges of the junction. If you were still reading the hint, or just looking at the city, both cars drove straight off the map. The level failed, restarted, and did the same thing again. A lot of first sessions ended right there, with the player never having drawn a line.

The level was not hard. The game just never gave a new player the few seconds they needed to understand what it wanted.

What we changed

• Tutorial cars wait for you. In the three tutorial levels a car now stays parked at its spawn point until you give it a route. No timer, no pressure.
• A hand shows the move. On your first try, a hand presses on the car, drags a dotted line to the pin and lets go, on a loop, until you draw yourself.
• No crash screen in the first three levels. If something goes wrong the level quietly restarts. After two restarts the game shows every car's route as a ghost line and slows the traffic down.
• A warning before a car leaves the board. Later levels do not wait, so an undrawn car that is about to drive off now gets a marker and a honk.
• A calmer first real level. Cars on the first level after the tutorials now arrive about 2.5 seconds apart, up from about 1.7.
• Extra modes open after the tutorial. The Daily level, Rush Hour and Endless Shift stay locked until you have finished the three tutorials, so nobody lands in the hardest content in their first minute.

What is next

We are watching how new players get on with these changes before touching anything else. If you tried the game early and bounced off the tutorial, it should feel very different now.

Did the first few levels make sense to you? Tell us where you got stuck.