[RELEASED] Tutorial Master 2 - Effortlessly Create Interactive UI Tutorials

Asset Store Page ​

Tutorial Master 2 is now Live!​

What is Tutorial Master?
Tutorial Master is an editor extension that allows developers to quickly create interactive tutorials! It supports pretty much any platform Unity supports (including VR) and requires minimal tweaks (normally UI configurations) to make it work.

Why do I need this?

Why bother programming an interactive tutorial when there’s a game to make and deadlines to meet?

Developers (like you) are busy creating awesome games. A lot of time is spent on polishing code and ensuring the game is fun, and yet no time is invested in teaching players how to play a game. Instead, a basic “How to Play” image is added in hope that players would read and play it. In reality, nobody would bother to read all that and would abandon the game shortly after just because they couldn't understand mechanics. All this effort of making a game gone for nothing!

Tutorial Master will change all that!

Try the WebGL Inventory Demo Here!​

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Current Features:

✓ Present your tutorials with Pop-ups
✓ Highlight UIs with Arrows and Highlighters
✓ Multi-canvas support
✓ Works with non-canvas elements
✓ Built-in localization system
✓ Built-in object pooling system
✓ Flexible workflow
✓ Play audio clips
✓ Intutive UI
✓ No programming knowledge required!
✓ No game code modifications needed
✓ Create advanced tutorials with a flexible system
✓ Extend tutorials’ behaviour with UnityEvents!
✓ Add logic to tutorials with triggers
✓ 'Inventory Demo' example scene included
✓ C# source code included
✓ Responsive support
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Supports:

✓ Curved UI
✓ Playmaker
✓ TextMesh Pro​

Visit Support Section to learn more about Tutorial Master 2. It's being constantly maintained and updated!​

Some video tutorials

Tutorial Master is available on Asset Store for $40. Keep an eye on this thread for latest updates

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

 

API Documentation and User Manual are now available to public.

This will help everyone to have an overall idea on how Tutorial Master works and how easy the setup process is!

 

Keeping my eye on this!

Seems like a great way to handle UI tuts. I gave the video a quick watch, but being at work, didn't catch all the details. Is it built to handle situations where the player actually has to go do stuff between messages? Or would that basically just be breaking down a single tutorial into multiple smaller tutorials that get triggered when needed?

 

Yes! The Tutorial Master is designed to handle such situations. The next part of the tutorial can be triggered with a single line of code - frame.Next().

For example, if you want to make a tutorial to teach the player how to jump. A tutorial message is displayed once the player stands in front of the pit, teaching him how to jump. Once the player jumps over, he triggers a collider to pause/stop the tutorial.

Hope this answers your question.

 

Nice! I've been doing an awful lot of rolling my own solutions for things this time, which is great, but it also means I'm a good bit behind where I wanted to be. When I get to the tutorial-making stage, I'll be heavily considering picking this up to get back on schedule.

Keep us updated on when it's available!

 

Sure! No problem

 

Made a new video on how easy it is to use your own Arrow UI or Tutorial Master. Enjoy!

 

More Tutorial Master videos are on the way. Subscribe to the YouTube channel or receive new updates on Twitter

 

Great News, Tutorial Master is now LIVE on the Asset Store!


Get it here: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/65443

 

The videos and documents look great! Just a very important question: Is this support NGUI, or will it support in the future? Since we using NGUI in all our games and still may not to adapt to UGUI in soon future...

 

Hi,

NGUI is in the to-do list and will be supported in the future

Elmar

 

Nice, we also developed our own simple tutorial system for NGUI in our games but it's sort of buggy and thats why looking for a complete solution, sure will wait for yours...

 

I will let you know when the feature ships

 

Tutorial Master Update v1.01 has been submitted to the Asset Store.

Changelog:
* Tons of bug fixes
* Updated documentation

 

Tutorial Master v1.01 Now LIVE​

Good news! Tutorial Master v1.01 is now live on the Asset Store and is more stable than ever!

 

Showing off a new feature in Tutorial Master v1.02:

• Add frames faster! Simply drag your desired GameObject into Frames list to create a new Frame! You can even drag multiple GameObjects to create multiple Frames at once!

• Also added smarter frame/tutorial deletion system

A small update has been submitted to the Asset Store for a review. Will let you know when it goes live

 

Tutorial Master v1.02 Now LIVE - 30% OFF SALE!​

Tutorial Master v1.02 is now live on the Asset Store! And it's on SALE - 30% off (regular price $35)!

Sale is going to last for 7 days.

 

Showing off an upcoming Tutorial Master v1.1 feature - Typing Text Effect!

There are more coming up! Stay tuned!

 

PlayMaker Support is coming to the next Tutorial Master Update!

See how it works with Tutorial Master:

 

A couple of questions:

- Does it work with multiple Canvases? (Both Overlay and Screen Space)
- When designing the frames is there a possibility to execute custom code?
- Will the highlight UI function disable all other gameObjects for input?

 

Hi @amokk_gw To answer your questions...

Tutorial Master works with both Overlay and Screen Space Canvases.

Tutorial Master comes with a nice event system, which runs custom code when one of the following occurs:

• Tutorial starts/ends
• Frame starts

You can watch the video to see it in action:

If you want to run code on specific tutorial/frame, you can check the current frame/tutorial id before executing code, like so:

Code (CSharp):

1. if (tutorial.id == 5)
2. {
3.  
4.     //do something
5.    
6. }

If you have the Dark Background enabled (UI panel that covers everything except the UI target), it will cover the UI input, and therefore user won't be able to use it.
Without Dark Background, you'll have to manually disable user input using the Event System (as mentioned before).


If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Elmar

 

The pointing arrow and the dark background are not working for me. The arrow is always miles away from the pointing object. The canvas is set to screen space camera.


In this scenario it's even outside of the canvas. These are the settings:


The dark background is always covering the whole screen. It doesn't exclude the assigned gameObject. It only works for me if the assigned gameObject is in the same canvas and in the top hierarchy as the dark background, which is an unrealistic scenario.

I would greatly appreciate some help.
Thanks!

 

Hello @amokk_gw

Could you please export the project into a .unitypackage file and send it to support@hardcodelab.com? I will have a look at it.

Elmar

 

Unfortunately I can't send you the real project. But the issues are easily reproduceable, so I've setup a showcase project. Sent it to you by mail. Thanks for having a look!

I haven't analyzed the code too much, but from what I see the dark background has a couple of issue.

The first is that objects in different canvases which have a higher order are always drawn on top. This isn't too bad since you can always set the Tutorial Canvas as the top canvas. But if you have objects (which needs to be highlighted in the tutorial) in different canvases they will always be behind the dark background.

Also it seems that all it's doing is ordering the highlighted object above the dark background (which can cause problems). What I would expect though, is that the opacity on the pixels above the highlighted object would be decreased to 0.

 

Sorry, the approach with the pixels won't work obviously, since it won't be raycastable. But I think it'll require 4 dark background planes, placed around the highlighted object.

 

Doing this method would mean recalculating position and scale for 4 dark background planes, which in turn would have pressure on game performance. On top of that, having 4 dark background planes means more draw calls.

 

Hi elmar1028,

Tutorial Master looks great!

Question: I saw the tutorial videos using UI elements to trigger/control tutorial, but regarding 3D objects in the scene:

1 - I guess I'd have to create a script, attach to my object and call tutorial.Start() for it, is there an easier way?
2 - Does the dark background (that darkens everything except objects related to the frame) work for non UI elements too?
3 - Does Tutorial Master help me disable input for game objects not-related to the frame? For example, imagine I have a RTS game like Warcraft, right now I can click every UI element and every 3D object in the scene. How would I implement a tutorial to teach the user to "click on this particular character to select him", disabling everything else in the scene?

Thank you!

 

Hi @roberto_sc

Tutorial Master has a Playmaker support with all pre-added functions including tutorial.Start()

There is also a premade script that you can simply drag into any GameObject and call functions such as tutorial.Start() and tutorial.Stop()

Dark Background UI works only with UI elements.

Dark Background UI covers all elements of the screen, but gameplay elements must be disabled manually through code.

Tutorial Master comes with an Events System (e.g OnTutorialStart) so you don't have to check which frame is running every frame.

For example:

Code (CSharp):

1. if (frame.id == 3)
2. {
3.       DisableGamePlay();
4. }
5. else
6. {
7.       EnableGamePlay();
8. }

You can see the video of Events System in action:

Hopefully, that answers all your questions.

Kind Regards,

Elmar

 

Yes, I guess I learned all that the hard way

It also seems to not work if you don't create your UI in a specific way...? Because the Dark Background uses the order in hierarchy to do its magic it doesn't seem to work if I have a more complex UI structure like panels inside the canvas with buttons inside and I want to highlight one of the buttons...

Right now I'm trying to change Tutorial Master to be able to at least point the arrow to a non-UI element. That was a bit misleading, when I saw in the video that it accepted a game object I thought I could put anything there, while it needs to have a rect transform in order to work. If you could point me where I should make the changes to accept a world object for the arrow it would help a lot.

Thanks!

 

Hi @roberto_sc,

Could you please email me support@hardcodelab.com so I can confirm your purchase?

Kind Regards,

Elmar

 

Sent.
Regards.

 

One more question, do you use PlayerPrefs for storing Tutorial Master settings from the editor? It looks like every time I clean all Player Prefs I end up losing part of my work in the Tutorial Master game object. It's strange, it rolls back to a previous version of what I did.

 

What do you mean by that? Do you lose settings of Tutorial Master or do you lose your own progress?

 

I lose Tutorial Master settings.

It's actually unrelated to cleaning PlayerPrefs. My Tutorial Master is a prefab, I found out that if you edit it straight in the Project window the changes are not persisted (even if I press Save Project), that is, I have to drag the prefab to the Hierarchy window, make the changes there, hit Apply and Save Project.

 

Thanks for letting me know about the problem. I will look into.

In the meantime, just edit prefabs directly.

 

Inventory Demo WebGL Demo link has now been fixed!

You can interact with the demo here: http://bit.ly/2f3Nob5

 

Hello Everyone,

It has been a while since announcements have been made. Here’s what I’ve been up to.

PlayMaker actions are now available for download! Simply import .unitypackage into your project and custom actions will be available automatically.

Currently, Tutorial Master is undertaking large changes in its codebase: everything is being rewritten almost from scratch. This is a crucial step as it would allow developers to incorporate their own features and changes without causing a conflict with existing code.

With codebase rewritten, Tutorial Master 1.5 will start getting some exciting features! Here’s the current roadmap:

Planned Features:

• Multi-Canvas support - you can have tutorials working across multiple UI Canvases
  
  
• NGUI Support - support for a third-party UI framework solution
  
  
• Debug Mode - enable visual debug mode, showing what tutorial and frame are being played
  
  
• Multiple Arrow UI, Highlight Target, Text UI and Icon UI objects can now be created. Now you can have multiple arrows pointing at multiple highlight targets
  
  
• Updated videos and API documentation - more detailed documentation that highlights all variables and functions to make it easier for developers to play around with scripts
  
  
• Lots of bug fixing
  
  
• Code is much more efficient, spending fewer resources

In the future:

• Change the way Dark Background UI works
  
  
• Make Dark Background and Arrow work with 3D GameObjects
  
  
• Allow Arrow UI to point at the edge of the screen if the highlighted target isn’t visible by the camera
  
  
• More effects in the future

I am also working on a website which is going to be the main place for all guides, API Documentation, latest news and announcements for the Tutorial Master as well as other future products. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are already active and all latest news will be shared there as well.

There is no ETA on Tutorial Master 1.5 yet, but hopefully, it shouldn't take a long time.

 

Hi Elmar,

I am keeping an eye on your asset.
I have a completed game and I want to integrate your tutorial. The problem is some of the tutorial things are instantiated on runtime and not available from the beginning.

Can I change Tutorial Master on runtime, is there any API for it?
Simple example: assume there is a button which instantiates a window in the game. There is a tutorial flow: frame 1 - tap a button, frame 2 - close window by tapping a button in the instantiated window.
I want to prepare all frames and set the target of the second frame on runtime. Is this possible?

 

Hi rganeyev,

Thanks for taking an interest,

Yes, it is possible to modify all values of Tutorial Master at runtime! It will function properly as long as the tutorial is not being played (or it may cause some errors).

Currently, I haven't written an API documentation on internal functions and variables but I'll gladly guide you through each of them

Kind Regards,

Elmar

 

support@hardcodelab.com had problems receiving emails. The problem is now fixed. Users whose emails didn't go through, please resend them.

 

HardCodeLab.com is live! All Tutorial Master updates, news, learning articles and upcoming features are going to be posted there. More importantly, it's going to host a more detailed documentation (powered by Doxygen), which would make it a lot easier to learn how to use Tutorial Master API as well as tinker its source code. The website still lacks few pages, but they'll be added soon.

Tutorial Master Update 1.5 is in active development. Refactoring code takes most of the time, but it is essential for making rapid implementations of upcoming features in the future.

Stay tuned for more updates, and if you're not the forums person then you can follow HardCodeLab on Twitter or Facebook or be sure to check back on hardcodelab.com once in a while!

Cheers!

 

Hi Elmar,

Do you plan huge refactoring of the your asset? I bought it and I am fully disappointed.
Starting from the mixing of completely different code-styles ending by performance leaks - it's simply bad.

 

Hi,

I am very surprised to hear about the problems you've encountered as you're the first person, out of more than 60 satisfied customers of the Tutorial Master, to be disappointed in it.

If you personally don't like the product, I will gladly provide you a refund.

Best Regards,

Elmar

 

Hi,
I'm very glad to see this solultion for tutorial.

I know that NGUI support is on its way. But I need to know when it's coming to decide to get this.
Could you tell me the target date when it's coming? (Like Mid Jan is okay for me, and I understand that schedule can be changed)

 

Hi,

I am glad you're interested in Tutorial Master!

The upcoming update is significant as there are a lot of things that are needed to be done apart from adding NGUI support. I will let you know after it's been thoroughly tested in a closed BETA.

Kind Regards,

Elmar

 

Empires in Ruins uses Tutorial Master to create their tutorials. An amazing tower defense game that is being developed by an amazing team! See Tutorial Master in Action

Check out their game on Steam Greenlight!​

 

Tutorial Master Update 1.0.3 patch is now live on the Asset Store!

Fixed a critical bug that would override existing tags

 

I just purchased this and was using it for a html5/webGL project. When playing on the iPhone it stops working. I tested my game and also the demo you provide. It seems the preloader works but then I get the below issue.

 

Hi,

Thank you for purchasing Tutorial Master!

Keep in mind that not all mobile devices fully support WebGL yet (a warning is displayed in advance). I have just tested the demo on my Android phone and it worked perfectly, whereas, an iOS device failed to load it. Both were tested using Google Chrome.

Tutorial Master itself is fully written in C# and does not rely on third-party plugins or DLL so it cannot cause problems for WebGL.

Regards,

Elmar