June 21, 2022
Tutorials are a requirement in games to make sure your players know how to even interact with your game, since if they can’t figure out how your systems work they’ll never have fun with your game. So let’s take some time today to think about how we can include tutorials to make sure our players know what they need to to enjoy playing.
Tutorials are a requirement in games to make sure your players know how to even interact with your game, since if they can’t figure out how your systems work they’ll never have fun with your game. So let’s take some time today to think about how we can include tutorials to make sure our players know what they need to to enjoy playing.
Now, covering all the different ways you could create a tutorial while keeping this article to a reasonable length is not possible, so we’re going to take a look at two extremes: covering everything in the tutorial and not having a tutorial at all.
The first type of tutorial we’ll look at is one where you explain every last detail to your players. This could be your hero’s mentor talking about all the systems during the story, or pictures that appear when your players first come across something new.
This option has a very obvious positive: you know exactly what your player knows about the game. If your tutorial covers how poison is a state that isn’t effective against certain enemies, then you know that your players are less likely to use poison-based skills against those enemies. Your systems can also be as unique as you want and break away from commonly used systems, because you know that your players will be fully informed about how the systems work and won’t have to experiment to make use of it. If you have a crafting system where adding extra herbs to a potion will make a stronger potion and you explain that to your players before they use the crafting system, then they’ll add in herbs instead of adding random items to the potion that won’t help (or could make a useless item instead).
Of course, there are some possible negatives to explaining everything too. Players that are used to your type of game or are replaying it already know the basics, so having to sit through message after message explaining it all again may be boring for them.
And what if the tutorial covers everything at the start of the game, long before your players have to deal with certain systems? If your tutorial tells players that poison-based skills aren’t effective against certain enemies, but your players never fight those enemies until two hours later then it’s likely that your players will have forgotten it and may be annoyed that their favored poison skills suddenly don’t work the way they’ve been working the entire game. Giving all the tutorial info at once is also a good way to overwhelm new players, meaning they may totally ignore sections of your game or even give up and move onto a different game.
So, how can we make a tutorial that covers everything not overwhelming? First thing we can do is make sure that our players want the tutorial to cover everything by asking them. If they say ‘yes’, then we can turn On a switch that lets all the tutorial parts play like normal, and if they say ‘no’ then we can leave the switch Off, making the events skip over the tutorials.
If our players do want the tutorial to cover everything, then we still need to keep in mind that a large info-dump won’t help our players. Your crafting system may give your players a lot of freedom in making things, but if your tutorial explains every ingredient at once when you first introduce the system then it’s likely that info won’t stick in their heads. We can help overcome that issue by breaking the tutorial down so that the basics are explained, and then give our players the option for a more in-depth explanation after the basics. We could also add in a special item or menu option where our players can reread the tutorials and refresh their memories on how certain things work if they leave the game alone for a while and want to pick it back up later.
On the other end of the spectrum we have the option to have no tutorial at all. You can give your players a story reason to head out into the game’s world and let them learn the ins and outs of the gameplay alone.
We’ve all played a game where there isn’t a good tutorial so you probably already know the negatives to this option, but let’s look at the positives first. Players who are familiar with the genre or are replaying the game already know how the game’s systems work, so they don’t have to sit around while the tutorial covers things they already know. It can also be a lot of fun for players to figure things out by themselves, like playing around with your crafting system and finding a way to make an overpowered weapon all on their own.
Giving your players the freedom to learn and improve on their own is nice, but lacking a tutorial entirely has some pretty big negatives. If you have custom systems that you never explain in detail, your players may end up misunderstanding how those systems really work and cause confusion. If your poison-based skills don’t work on certain enemies due to their location but you never mention that in the game then it’s possible that your players will instead think that the poison skills don’t work on any enemies that look like those enemies. Poison skills may only not work on Swamp Fish, but your players aren’t mind readers so they may think that those skills don’t work on any Fish enemies, and never bother using those skills in a number of battles where it could’ve helped.
New players also may end up lost if there aren’t any tutorials. If this is their first time playing an RPG and you don’t explain why using Guard in battle could be useful and how different skill types interact, they may give up playing because they keep getting defeated in the first boss battle.
Is there a way we can limit the tutorial without leaving our players in the dark? Of course! We can set up a tutorial level at the start of the game that lets our players experiment without having to worry about getting a game over. Battling against enemies that are designed to not wipe out the party gives players a way to mess around with the different skills without having to worry too much. If we wanted our players to learn how our crafting system works at the start of the game, we could set up a situation where they have to craft something (making sure that our players have unlimited access to the ingredients so they can test things out) before moving on.
Instead of telling our players how to do something, we can show them by having an NPC or party member do an action in-game. If we want to warn our players that the enemies in the next area won’t be affected by poison skills, then we could have a cutscene in that area where an NPC is shown using a poison skill and then getting their butt kicked by the unaffected enemy. That shows our players that poison skills aren’t the best option in this area without having to explain it to them in a message. This method can be a bit tough to get right, but if you want to limit the amount of obvious tutorials in your game then spending some extra time hiding tutorials in scenes around the game is worth it.
Both these extremes have their own pros and cons, but if you plan well you can avoid some of the bigger issues no matter what level of tutorials you decide to include. How did you create the tutorials for your game? Did you come up with a unique way to give your players info without having an NPC just tell it to them, or does your game teach your players through trial and error?
