[Design] How To Make Sure Your Game Doesn't Need An Instruction Manual

http://blog.codinghorror.com/level-one-the-intro-stage/

Something that the game industry has known for a long time - have a good intro stage.

Sure, the source here isn't known for writing games (he's more of a social software kind of guy; he was a founder of StackOverflow, and is creating the next-gen forum setup Discourse.) But, the general ideas are sound - a nice, safe, 'easy' place to learn key skills that you use throughout the software leads to people learning to use software more efficiently.

Thoughts?

 

The blog is pretty much common sense, and something most game developers should know and do. It is good advice.

However, a somewhat less obvious issue is how do you know whether your tutorial is sufficient or not?

Can you answer the following questions:

What percentage of people complete your tutorial?
What percentage of people are still playing your game after 1 day, after week 1?
How long in average does it take to complete the tutorial?
Which step in your tutorial takes longer?
How many people are you dropping on each step?
How many people are using each one of your key features?

If you can't answer these kinds of questions, then you don't really know how good your tutorial is, and whether some particular feature requires a "manual" or "tutorial"

So my thoughts on the article are:

Yes, make the first level a tutorial where you introduce the player to the game. If your game requires a manual, you have failed period. But make sure you measure it. Use Flurry or Localitycs or whatever analytics tool you prefer, and really understand whether your tutorial works.

 

Kind of says a lot about nothing. "The moral of the story is games can teach people without telling them anything, and I was talking about software. Think about that." There, word count significantly reduced.

Crappy blog post aside, usability isn't something to be taken lightly even though it's rarely, if ever, a thought.

 

I disagree with you. It's not about nothing, he's making a case for taking something that works great in games - the tutorial level - and finding ways to make business software use this concept in a constructive way.

But, it has design implications too. I can't help but notice all of the building games and 'Dwarf Fortress'-likes coming out that have their own wikis that are mandatory reading to play the game (Gnomoria is one I have direct experience with.) For some reason, people are making games that require a ton of background reading. Yet, we know that's anti-fun. Yet, people who write social/business applications are now arguing that the past couple of decades of game development were onto something after all.

 

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I sent a few of my friends an early build of my game with no explanation regarding gameplay in order to get some initial feedback a few weeks ago (It's a 2D overhead shooter). The player has a sword that you can swing by pressing the right mouse button. Everybody figured out that you could do this. You can also hold the right mouse button to block with your sword and reflect bullets. Nobody figured this out. The lesson? For an input device, the deepest level of exploratory interaction I can count on is a single button press, and the button has to be obvious (keys around WASD, mouse buttons, controller face buttons). Of course, it doesn't help that nobody knew that they could block, and nothing in the short demo level indicated that you could.

So, how do I get players to learn how to block? Do I open the game with a short (in game) cutscene showing the player blocking some incoming bullets? Will players see that and say "Oh, that's cool", then try to figure it out? Or will they assume it's just something done in the cutscene to look cool? Should I show an image featuring the game's controls while the level is loading (I probably should)? Will people pay attention to that? Should I pop up a dialog box when the first wave of enemies appears telling the player the basic controls? Will they just skip it? If I don't let them skip it, how much are they going to be annoyed? If I develop a tutorial mode, will anybody even play it?

In the end, it's going to take a bit more work getting people to understand my game than I initially though. However, I've recently had a few confused moments in games I'm playing that occurred due to lack of explanation. And it sucks when a game doesn't explain itself well, so I know it's something I have to get right.

 

You don't need to teach the player everything at once. Teach them as the game progresses.

Nintendo do it by having clever level design. Far cry 3 does it with ingame video that pops up and additional ingame help menu.

 

None of those games are about the casual experience though. To play those games requires knowing about all the systems in play at once. You could breakdown the systems and teach them piecemeal, a la Stronghold type campaigns, but most of this stems from DF which is more than content to say "you are now a part of this world (and all it's hidden fun stuff). Have fun."

These games are also radical extremists in comparison to the megamens that are all about unraveling and unlocking new abilities as the games progress and have a natural pacing for a player's understanding of the game. It's easy to slowly acclimate people to mechanics when only ten percent are available at the beginning of the game and you slowly add more as it goes on.

 

First, I do agree that the X Fortress and MineCraft/Terraria spinoffs are intentionally not directed at being 'casual' experiences (though, the block building games are getting some tactical nerfs due to their widespread popularity.) It's perfectly OK to have games that cater to the uber-hardcore 1% (or, those who believe they're the uber-hardcore 1%), and their being satisfied is a good thing.

I feel that your reasoning breaks down in the paragraph quoted, though. In Gnomoria, you have access to about 5% of the mechanics in the entire game at the beginning; all your gnomes can do is dig, deforest, and forage. You have to reach wherever the stone level is in your world to begin to be able to build the workstations you need to found your gnome kingdom.

From there you start straddling a dazzlingly complex (and, nearly un-presented) tech tree to unlock more workstations, which requires more digging, deforesting, and crafting, while maintaining food, while building defenses for when the end of spring comes, etc. etc. This is effective, because really there's not too much of a difference between MineCraft and Gnomoria, except for A) the character perspective, and B) the ways that you're allowed to interact with the game world. Your primary actions are gathering, and building.

All of that's to say, you do start with limited mechanics that you have to gain access to, just like Megaman. I feel that the first season of the game, when stuff isn't (immediately) trying to kill you is a sort of attempt at an intro stage. They're clearly trying to acclimate players, but between a rather bewildering set of options, and an otherwise unintuitive interface, you're going to be consulting documentation of some sort before long.

Traditional game design wisdom is telling us that's a bad thing, yet it's happening in popular games (e.g. MineCraft.) This is very interesting.

 

It's not like it can't be done, sure. I've seen it done more commonly with city building type games where progression is pretty much a part of an optimal strategy. Teaching in these examples is usually by strongly hinting that something is highly recommended, and is usually dependent on the UI. More often than not, these games do have a grand optimal strategy that dominate all playthroughs that doesn't have much variablity.

The irony to that is only video games have this notion. Name a board game that doesn't require reading at least two-thirds of the rules to figure out. I won't say this is a completely misguided notion, but there are times where K.I.S.S. isn't the solution to everything.

 

I have also thought about this a lot as i am developing a casual game and do not want a manual or/and any type of text, except were the player put in her/his name as well as name a template (part of the game). I want it to be language agnostic. Except for that I am designing the game with that in mind and my graphical artist is also working on this a lot by designing icons and picture based instructions. All the icons should show clearly what it does and the instruction is the absolute minimal amount needed. This sound pretty easy to do with a casual game but it turn out it is a lot of work to get it good with a consistent graphic profile. Well, this game does not require any complex maneuvers so it is not as hard as if there was different type of blocking maneuvers etc..

 

In my opinion having a tutorial level is a good idea.
Only don't force me to play it.

 

Also, use creative ways to teach the basics. Very important.


(For those who don't get it, this is a reference to the Shadow of Mordor game)

 

This is actually something I like about The Elder Scrolls Online. The initial Coldharbour area can be skipped on subsequent characters (and, I do!)

 

Yeah.
Metroid Prime 1 on Gamecubey is a good example.
The Space Pirate Frigate stage at the start of the game, is a good example.
As you go through the ruined frigate, they tell you how to do stuff, like scan objects and items to get data, charge up your power beam gun to destroy rubble, and how to do morph ball ability etc.
And everytime you get a new power up item,throughout the game, eg. Magnet Ball etc.
They put on screen, what to do, or how to use it.

Wind Waker is another great example too.

 

No need for a blog post just watch this video.

 

In my current project I've tried very hard to introduce mechanics to the player through level design rather than textual instructions. For example if I want a player to know they can double jump I make a level where it's required to proceed and it's very obvious that that jump is the only path forward. For more complex mechanics I just try to make sure that the default flow of the level will cause the player to "discover" how stuff works. Hard to explain but the mechanics of my game are relatively simple as far as controls are concerned so it's not to difficult to accomplish this.

 

How NOT to do it:​

Linear step-by-step tutorial in an environment, only crafted for this purpose. "Kill this enemy now", "Jump now", "Duck here", "Press this button", "Press that button".
I don't know how many shooters I've played, that started with you - the elite soldier after years of training - on the shooting range requiring in-depth explanation about how a gun works. That's bullshit. It makes absolutely no sense and is padding; A waste of time. You could skip it and the experience wouldn't be cheapened.

How to do it:​

Don't make tutorial levels, but rather make those first, safe stages be a part of the experience. It's easier said than done, so I'll explain it using a game that did it right.

The Half-Life series is a master of the art in this discipline.
Half-Life starts with you riding a tram to work. After you leave the train, you explore parts of the facility by yourself heading for work. Later, when the real part of the game starts, the difficulty-curve hits this sweet-spot, where it's neither too abrupt, nor too boring. It blends seamlessly into the action. This intro does two things that tutorial levels don't.

1. The learning-process is woven into the experience. You're essentially playing a day at work. It's natural. Instead of having climbing a ladder because of...."reasons", you climb a ladder because it's part of your job. It makes sense for you to have to climb a ladder at that point.
2. It's not a waste of time. The whole thing is not only used to teach you the mechanics, but also to set the scene for the story. It's part of the narrative.

Half-Life 2 does an even better job. There is a reason why most of the time at least one - but often both - those games are in those "Best games of all times" lists. They're usually very, very far on top, too. Excellent game-design is just one of those reasons.

 

I'd say it depends on the type of game. For the learning projects I've done, I've just added a button to the main menu which says something along the lines of "How to use this piece of troll fat". That displays a box using the old GUI, explaining what the controls are and what you should be doing. For my Master's thesis, I included a file explaining how to use the software (right now, I can't remember if it was a text file or a PDF!).

I'm going to echo TheSniperFan's comments about weaving the tutorial into the story. Another example that I think did it well was Halo:Combat Evolved. As far as I remember, the section on looking up/down and inverting the controls was skipped on the harder difficulties, and on the easier difficulties it was part of a systems check after coming out of cyrosleep. Similarly, jumping and melee attacks were taught by a need to find a way around a blocked door.

 

The three main types of tutorials that I could think of:

• Linear Tutorial Level - These tutorials often drop you into a level where it gives you very detailed instructions that has to be completed before you can progress to the next step. This type of tutorials ain't bad like some people claim them to be, they are just equally horrible like the rest if placed into the wrong game. These tutorials are best suited for games that turn movement, interaction and mechanics etc on their head. Games that require that the player quickly learn a large set of new skills just to get started. A space flight simulator game might be a good fit for this type of tutorial and it can be a good idea to document the different parts of the menu in the form of a help menu which the player can open at a later point if he has forgotten something.
• Fragmented Tutorials - These tutorials often give you a detailed explanation together with a task that you must complete like the alternative above but the are not locked into a level. They are instead spread out through the game and appear when a mechanics, typically new, different from what we are used to appear. A good example where this can be used is in a game that got a deep, revolutionizing and complicated crafting system. Most of the game stick to traditional systems while this mechanics and maybe some others are so different that they require a deeper explanation.
• Integrated Tutorials - These tutorials are often a part of the game-play, they player is told or shown something that he then have to repeat to progress further into the game. It can even happen that the player is given an item that he intuitively can guess how to use (like a gravity gun) and some appropriate obstacle(s) where to experiment on. These are often best used in games where the mechanics are intuitive, some-what well known or very similar to something he has already, probably experienced in many other games. This type of tutorial is common in games like Mega Man, Hal-Life and similar titles that use common game mechanics that the player probably used in other games.
• Information Tutorials - These tutorials often appear only as small audio/text/image messages when the player is about to do some action for the first time. These are best suited for games that doesn't have innovative game mechanics, instead 95% of the game is just made up of mechanics that we have seen hundreds of times elsewhere in titles of the same genre. They are not directly mean to teach you something unless you are a complete beginner, they are more meant to remind you that "hey, remember that you can do this by pressing that key".

There isn't one type of tutorial that is better then the other, there are only games that pick the wrong teaching method for the information that has to be taught to the players. Most games even attempt to stick to a single method when the proper method should be to use a combination of these methods. I don't need a detailed explanation for how to walk with WASD, a quick tooltip should be enough unless I have even hidden them but that innovative crafting and management systems for my kingdom might require something more detailed where I can safely go through it once, step by step while the game holds my hand.

You should always give players the option to skip/hide tutorials. You might even need several options or methods to control this if you use more then one method to teach them. You cannot make any assumptions either, the player might be young and new to games or he might have played your innovative game at friends place in the past...

You should also consider to always add safe zones when the player engages with a tutorial or some type of similar mechanic. It can be really annoying to get shot at while you try to master a new type of jump or end up killed because of a faction raid in the city that is supposed to be safe... even worse if you have to repeat a long tutorial from the start or you cannot access a tutorial that you need because of something that is happening in the game world.

Remember that we got many different types of games, many more then the mentioned Mega Man and Half-Life examples. The Mega Man games had many benefits like the simple input device of the era and that it borrowed many mechanics from well known games like Super Mario Brothers. Half-Life wasn't the first FPS game, we had seen many of the mechanics in the past and they only had to teach some new stuff that was very intuitive because they expanded upon existing, well known mechanics. There are also other games that should be considered when discussing good / bad tutorials; The Sims, Bejeweled clones, StarCraft, Baldurs Gate, Space Flight Simulators, Chess, World of Warcraft, Carcasonne, and so on... I bet everyone can find games where your most hated form of tutorial is the best option and there will be games in the future that define completely new forms of gameplay and tutorials

 

kind of off topic, but :
something i noticed is instruction manuals are noo where like they used to be... you used to get this book with lists of tons of items in the game, magic spells, some story, etc... .. i really miss that..

for example, call of duty comes with a little pamphlet, its like 2 pages and just has controls and some legal information... they shouldve listed all the weapons and perks and stuff and have a page or 2 about the story...

.. obviously, its to cut costs... but it just makes me think the game is garbage and lazy..
even gta5 was just this little pamphlet... but gta san andreas (at least for pc) was a hardbound book.

for real, when i see that little pamphlet instruction book i just think "dang, why did i buy this game?"
its a little thing, but, as i have experienced the history of games, it just makes me shake my head,

also, the focus on good graphics is stupid, i hate mainstream games nowdays, they all suck big time..

i have kept all the books for my games, and its really cool to look thru them, but the pamphlet ones, might as well throw them away because they dont contain anything useful or interesting