I find this interesting is games (and the development thereof). While playing people are usually concentrating really hard on something of their own choice, so they will often miss various popups trying to tell them vital things about how to play the game.

Probably the best way to do it is to force show them a handful of elements center screen, and then where those go into the smaller overall view. This is really intrusive though and you don't want to present too much information too quickly this way.

After that maybe if they're not interacting with a side segment for a while make it perform some action to draw attention, but its a fine line between not enough and too over the top.