New players know zilch - how not to scare users away

This one cannot be repeated enough as it's the biggest way to lose your players before they've even started. And though I know all this, I have to tell myself again and again because I fail to put it into practice - your players know nothing about anything and need crazy support to be invited into your world!

Just had the chance to try novaWARS on a couple of casual players this morning, and immediately they were dying over and over and losing interest. It was just too easy to die off the edge of the world while trying to come to terms with the controls, something that didn't even cross my mind. Sure, I had made sure the first level had enemies that wouldn't shoot, just cannon fodder, and yet I had underestimated the difficulty these players would have with basic controller-like input. Coordinating left and right thumbs at the same time was completely alien to them. There's the option of simplified touch controls for just these casual players, but if they want to explore the joys of proper gaming, all they'll learn from a few quick deaths is they can't do it and give up.

As a game developer, you literally cannot oversimplify the introduction. There must be no chance for failure in anything the player attempts, otherwise you'll lose them to the million other apps/games vying for their attention. From the very beginning they need to be winning. They need to be passing the objectives, and accomplishing everything they set out to accomplish. Yet it's very easy to accidentally create problems. For example, my ship spawns facing up, which means they are often pointing to the edge of space and death the moment they start. Press the engine button and they fly to their doom. Oops. And the default special ability is turbo-boost, which just blasts them off the edge of space to their doom. Oops.

Thankfully this is a fairly easy fix. A slower ship; facing inwards at start; a drift-free engine; a larger level. But if I hadn't seen it first hand, I'd have missed it and released publicly only to wonder why so many new players give up so quickly.