Teams that roll out game-based onboarding often hear the same thing: the first ten minutes were fun, and after that it felt like homework. Weak content is the cause less often than you would expect. The quests are close to real work and the feedback is solid. What is missing is the experience between one quest and the next.
While reworking First Run, we split that gap into five moments. This piece walks through each one, the design change that addressed it, and a few things we deliberately chose not to gamify. It is written for the HR, L&D, and project people who design new-hire programs, so it leans on decision criteria rather than game jargon.
1. Not Knowing Where to Go
Letting players explore freely is a strength in a leisure game and usually a failure in onboarding. New hires are not playing in their spare time; they are carving twenty or thirty minutes out of a workday. Spend half of that hunting for the next destination and the only lasting impression is having been lost. Exploration is fun for people with time to spare.
First Run handles wayfinding in three layers.
- Navigator arrow: when the next destination is off-screen, an arrow sits at the edge of the map with the NPC name and the distance in tiles. Once the target is on screen, it becomes a bouncing marker above their head. The destination is Guide Dan first, then the home mentor for your role, then the nearest mentor with open quests.
- Campus map: a button in the top-right corner of the play area shows the whole 48×32 campus on one screen, with your position, NPCs with open quests, buildings, and locked areas.
- Markers on the map: the ! and ✓ above NPCs, plus their name tags, tell you who still has something for you without walking over to check.
One more detail mattered: the option to turn it off. The arrow can be switched off in the MENU. Once someone knows the way, guidance that keeps following them is noise. Start with it on and let the player decide when to drop it.
2. No Sense of Momentum
When every quest pays out the same reward, the third one starts to feel like a chore. Nothing builds the feeling that things are going well.
First Run added a combo streak. Consecutive Good or Excellent answers build a combo: +10% EXP from two in a row, another 10 points for each further answer, stopping at +50% at six in a row. A Risky or Poor answer breaks it, and the current count shows on a flame chip in the HUD.
Why the Bonus Has a Cap
An uncapped bonus turns the combo into the goal. Players protect it by skipping quests that look hard and sticking to familiar types, which is the exact opposite of what onboarding wants from them. Capping it at +50% keeps the combo a pleasant boost that never grows large enough to change which quest someone picks.
Why Review Retries Are Neutral
Retrying a quest on the Review Board neither adds to the combo nor breaks it. If review broke the combo, players would put off review while a streak was running. If review extended it, players could pad the streak with questions they already know the answer to. Either way, the act of going back to learn gets distorted. Keeping review neutral makes it something you can do at any time without losing anything.
3. Progress That Only Shows at the End
A common structure in onboarding games is a completion screen after the last quest, with nothing in between. A progress bar filling a little at a time rarely makes anyone feel they have grown.
First Run breaks growth into moments along the way. The first is the level-up. When an answer pushes you over a level, the feedback screen plays a LEVEL UP banner with your new title. The step from Intern to Associate lands on the same screen as the feedback on the call you just made, so growth and judgment stay connected.
The second is a set of twelve achievements, chosen by a single rule: reward the behaviors you actually want in a first month on the job, not the volume of play.
- Talk to eight different colleagues (Friendly Newcomer).
- Enter four buildings (Campus Explorer).
- Recover one, then five, missed quests through review (Back on Your Feet, Review Master).
- Answer three quests from other roles well (Crossing Boundaries).
- Talk to rival Kevin in three different chapters (The Rival's Side).
There is no achievement that simply counts quests cleared. That kind of achievement rewards clicking fast, and clicking fast runs directly against practicing judgment. Talking to colleagues, exploring the space, and revisiting mistakes are the same behaviors you hope to see from a real new hire.
4. Failure That Feels Like Punishment
If a wrong answer earns nothing, people start playing not to be wrong. When unsure, they stall, search for the answer, or close the window. In onboarding, getting things wrong is half the learning, and a design like that shuts it down.
First Run has three mechanisms here.
- EXP floor: a Poor answer still pays at least 25% EXP and a Risky one at least 45%. Progress never stops because of a miss.
- Gentle coaching: miss the same quest twice and the tone of the feedback changes. It acknowledges that the question is genuinely tricky and points you to where you can try again.
- Review recovery: missed quests stay on the Review Board, and answering one correctly marks it Recovered and restores part of the mentor trust.
A floor set too high turns the game into one where any answer will do. That is why a wrong answer still costs reputation and mentor trust, and the quest stays open. Progress is guaranteed, but the result is still recorded.
5. Front-Loaded Tutorials Nobody Reads
Put eight lines of controls on the first screen and most people look for the close button. At that point they do not yet know what they will need. Explanations get read when they arrive at the moment they are needed.
Coach tips in First Run show up three times: the first time you explore, your first quest, and your first wrong answer. Each appears once and stays short. Where to retry a missed question is worth explaining at the moment of the first miss; any earlier, it is information nobody needs yet.
Missed tips can be replayed from the MENU, and anyone who wants the full explanation can open the separate beginner manual. Short guidance inside the game, reference material outside it.
What Not to Gamify
Adding fun can also break onboarding. These are things First Run leaves out on purpose, and why.
- Leaderboards between new hires: ranking people who joined at the same time turns learning into a contest. Those behind start asking fewer questions, and those ahead start going faster. Neither is what onboarding wants. If comparison helps, compare against yourself last week.
- Timers on judgment questions: a time limit measures reaction speed. In real calls like a change request or an incident report, what matters is reading the constraints to the end, not choosing quickly. A timer trains the habit of skipping the situation.
- Badges for reading documents: award a badge for opening a policy page and you get more pages opened and closed immediately. An open event cannot tell you whether someone read it, and a quest is a better check of whether they can make the call.
All three fail the same test: is the rewarded behavior the same as the behavior you want at work?
A Design Checklist for Onboarding Games
- Can a first-time player find the next destination on screen right away?
- Can the player turn wayfinding off?
- Is there a cap on streak rewards?
- Does review avoid both breaking and padding the streak?
- Does growth show up on the screen right after a decision?
- Are achievements tied to wanted behaviors rather than volume of play?
- Does progress continue after a wrong answer while the result is still recorded?
- Does each explanation appear once, at the moment it is needed?
- Are new hires kept out of rankings against each other?
Fun Is the Means, Not the Goal
In an onboarding game, fun is not the goal. It is a way to remove friction on the path to the actual goal, which is practicing judgment. All five moments in this piece were problems outside the quests, and none of them needed more quests to fix. If people say your onboarding game is boring, look at the experience between quests before you write more of them.
Try workplace scenarios as onboarding quests
See how the navigator, combos, and achievements feel in practice in the First Run demo. Play the Onboarding