Luca Redwood creates puzzle games. Good enough, if the receipt of You have to build a boat and 10,000,000 are something to do. His new game, Photographs, is a narrative puzzle adventure that uses adaptive tutorials. Nothing is revealed about what you’re supposed to do or how you’re supposed to do it unless you trigger invisible code that reveals specific information. the vast majority of teaching doesn’t use text for a simple reason, “some people will read your text,” says Redwood, “but most won’t.”

It is common knowledge in development circles that no matter how small, many players will avoid or miss parts of your tutorial. They clearly need to know how to play the game. How do you overcome their natural reluctance as successfully as possible?

“A lot of designers talk about the fact that certain types of tutorials don’t respect player intelligence, but I think these designers are working on games that can afford to leave a lot of players behind,” says Bobby Lockhart, Game Specialist. educational games and is the lead developer of the indie game Codemancer. “As a learning game designer, I don’t really have that luxury, so I try to include as many ways of teaching as possible.”

Lockhart identified a sequence necessary to take players through a successful learning process: teaching them why they’re doing things, what they’re going to do, and how to do them. “It’s very tempting to present these things in reverse order because players often seem to just want to dive in,” Lockhart said. “Sometimes you can get away with this, especially if the game has been heavily marketed, is a sequel, or just exists in a well-worn genre, where the ‘why’ and ‘what’ are known before the player sits down. to play.”

This makes Zachtronics’ work all the more impressive. Zachtronics is the studio behind logic games including Opus Magnum and Exapunks. Considering the complexity and unique interaction systems of these games, it seems like it would be easy to lose players at the first level. “Our first commercial game was SpaceChem, which included a ‘tutorial’ that took the form of text and images presented before the puzzles,” says Zachtronics founder Zach Barth.

“It wasn’t very good,” he continued. “The takeaway for us was that, rather than trying to design tutorials, we should design ‘experimentation areas’ where players can understand the mechanics through trial and error in a scaffolded way, rather than having try everything and error Sometimes we always include textual explanations, which are always disappointingly effective. And sometimes we use examples, especially in our puzzle games, where I like to put a solved puzzle on the screen next to an unsolved puzzle. “

Trial and error

Developers need this trial and error as much as gamers. Of the elements of a game that require extensive iteration before release, tutorials are among the most time-consuming, especially when built into the fabric of the experience itself. “As soon as the game has mechanics, we start building tutorials!” says Octodad: Kevin Zuhn, Creative Director of Dadliest Catch. “We have UI pop-ups to tell players the control input – hold the left mouse to lift the left leg – and their objective – to cross the room. This is the most brutal method. The rest, we teach through level design. ”

Player behavior and assumptions play a major role in this iteration. Streamers read each section of the Sunless Skies Early Access tutorial as if it were an essential part of the experience, making the first 30 minutes of footage a chore for viewers and clueless developers watching. According to narrative director Chris Gardiner, the final version underwent heavy changes that steered it towards a “concise, story-driven introductory experience.”

Chris Wilson, design director for the 2D infiltration game Siege and the Sandfox, found that gamers at gaming conferences try to play their game like an action platformer based on its appearance and get frustrated. “We placed enemies that would kill the player almost instantly if they just tried to cross. After that first encounter, we’re actually a lot more forgiving. Once their expectations were brutally recalibrated, the existing tutorials did their job. . ”

Tutorials are more than text and instructions. It’s a whole way of thinking built around the player’s introduction of the critical elements of a game. Maybe you’ll remember it the next time you skip one. You are a monster.