Hi,
I am busy with my second game, and for this game I was thinking about creating a in game tutorial on how to play. My previous game had a ~500 word description on how to play, so this is my fallback.
Has anyone reading this created an “in game tutorial”? If yes, can you provide some insight on where to start, what to avoid, links to howto’s, etc.
Regards,
John.
This GDC 2014 session from Threes creator Asher Vollmer covers the essential elements of a quality in-game teaching experience and the steps to take to empower your players without patronizing them.
What part is it that you’re interested in getting pointers on? The instructions or the implementation? Knowing the type of game would also help.
Personally, my games make fairly heavy use of event-based design on the programming side. So my tutorial is implemented as a bunch of GameObjects (probably within the UI) that listen for different events and appear or disappear as necessary.
For the writing part, figure out what it is the player needs to know to play your game unassisted, and write a series of steps and explanations that will take them through those things. It takes a lot of practice and feedback to get this right, because you don’t know how someone unfamiliar with your game will interpret and absorb what you’re writing. When I say “writing”, it’s not just about the text - the timing of when things show, where they show, and how they effect controls (do you pause? Lock all but the relevant button(s)? etc.) also matter. So you’re writing a script for the tutorial moreso than just the tutorial text.
Thanks for the detailed response.
It is a word game.
I am looking for a type of tutorial where the game shows and then prompts the user, e.g. “Touching this will start the puzzle!”, “Touch this word now”. The instructions will be lengthy, so I would like advice on how detailed to get in the tutorial? Should it be a basic tutorial and at the end provide a link to a detailed written version?
This is probably a better way of saying what I want to do. My thinking was along the lines of a new scene that specifically handles the tutorial only.
In the quote above there are a few things I thought I might have to do. I was not sure how I was going to approach this, and at this moment I am leaning towards having my entire screen as per the game (scene doesn’t change a lot). Then on top of the scene have UI popups that explain things and request that the user presses certain buttons or objects.
Are you comfortable sending me a link to a game where you have done this? I am currently using my memory from the clash of clans tutorial as a reference.
Thanks for you help.
Find a handful of successful similar games and check out their tutorials, follow their lead. That’ll be far more useful to you than my random musings.
That makes sense. I don’t want my tutorial objects hanging around all the time. So depending on the structure of my game, either they’re only in the scenes they’re relevant to, or there’s something that checks whether or not they should be present and either enables or destroys them as appropriate.
I’d happily do that if I had a game like yours. See my above comment about finding similar games and learning from their design.
My 2 cents is to make the initial tutorial as short as possible. I’ve played games that have 10-minute tutorials and by the time I’m done I’ve forgotten 70% of what they told me. I think it’s best to explain features over time as the player stumbles on them for the 1st time, rather than explain everything in the game in the 1st 10 minutes. Also, it’s a good idea to sprinkle “help” buttons in different windows so that if the player forgets something, it’s easy to read what each button does in that window.
Which reminds me to the Far Cry Blood Dragon tutorial. I did have a good laugh at it though, but it felt like it would never end. Tutorial starts at about 1 minute.
