This video reminds me of a Steam review I once read on Crusader Kings: "I played this for about 1000 hours, and I think I've almost finished the tutorial. Can't wait for the real game" :D
I recently started playing EU4 with one of my friends who has 1000s of hours in the game, I asked him what a certain button in a certain menu did, he didn't even know that menu existed (this was before the new update that broke everything)
I had a similar experience with CKII, I tried doing the tutorial (in which I controlled the kingdom of León as Alfonso VI) but it asked me to do something that was mind-numbingling stupid, which is try to take the Canary Islands by force. Between the distance from my kingdom, the lack of strategic usefulness of that territory and the painful first experience I had trying to attack them (between their defensive bonuses and the attrition my troops suffered from, it was a complete failure), I gave up on doing what the game told me to and instead set my eyes on much more logical objectives, like using my ruler's high Intrigue stats to make sure he inherits his dear brothers' kingdoms sooner rather than later. Two centuries later, the Empire of Hispania is butting heads with the accursed Holy Roman Empire, still not giving a crap about the Canaries. Thanks to the game's stupid tutorial, I made my own choices and had fun in the process.
@@Spicarium I think it depends on your previous gaming experience. If you're new to games then Ireland is great. If you have some experience playing other strategy games then starting off in Ireland is likely to be extremely boring. I remember when I first played CK2 and everyone recommends Ireland so I started off in Ireland, it's basically just sitting at speed 5 until you can fabricate claims and expand with nothing else to do because you're a count with no vassals or anything. I found playing as William the Conqueror a much more interesting but still noob friendly experience.
That's why I got good at math. I couldn't memorize stuff like everyone else, so I had to understand it by playing around with it. Then I could write out formulas because I knew why they were they that way, and only had a few things to memorize.
That can honestly applied to everything. A lot of people still fail at things simply because they are only told things and said "teachers" blame it on them for not doing it well or not at all. Case in point me, I have ADHD and for a long people have always been "Do this, do that", " Stop being lazy", and etc. but never go hands on with me and naturally I end up not following up on such things. Interestingly as well, I actually can learn fast and well and can perform very well and those are the time where I get involved in it. I'm a decent artist because of drawing lessons I had, I'm pretty good in certain videogames because well I play them and etc.
When it comes to the concept of tutorials, absolutely nothing is worse than when the game just tells me where to click without making sure I know why. I rarely learn what I'm supposed to, but then the game moves forward entirely assuming I understand everything perfectly now. I'm easily overwhelmed by too much information--especially visual information like numbers and symbols and menus and such--so that kind of teaching is a surefire way to confuse the heck out of me.
Ui's are a difficult thing to do. One of my least favorite things to do in general. But it's better not to have a tutorial at all. Unless you have a concept that truly needs one. Most trailers don't have overwhelming UI's too. So this could be easier. Also, Arlo, I didn't know you were a GMTK person
And don't forget the overwhelmingness of the tutorials in Monster Hunter! You said it yourself in your review, but it almost turned me away from the game because it was just so much, said so little and was incredibly intrusive, even though a single UA-cam tutorial of about 10 minutes set me up for 100+ hours of fun.
It’s like playing mafia with ur friends. once they understand the sheriff, doctor, and mafia, you can add more roles to make a complex game more enjoyable and accessible
"Blindly following instructions just isn't a very effective way to learn." This is what pisses me off about coding tutorials. They tell me what to type, but not what any of it means.
I always speculated that coding tutors who just told you what to type didn't truly know how it worked and were actually just copy-pasting and tweaking behind the scenes. But to be fair, I haven't stumbled upon that many since there's so many better tutorials out there that actually show you how stuff works. When you first learn to code you mostly need to learn basic syntax for the programming language and how to debug and test your code. And some background info on lower level languages can also drastically increase your understanding after that. But once you got that down and need to learn libraries, tutorials that just show example code can give you a lot of clues about how the libraries work.
I feel that way about most game design software I've used in school. I can make pretty neat things in Unreal Engine, but it's only because I'm copying and pasting blueprints from older projects. With a blank editor I'm totally lost.
There's a book that I have that actually tells you why a certain part of code works, in an interesting way too. The only problem is that it was outdated before I was born cause it focuses on code from the mid and early 90s.
I know people who might feel insecure about selecting 'easy' difficulty (moreso when they already play games regularly) when trying out complex games or new genres and it results in them being unable to learn at their own pace at higher difficulties and dropping the new game altogether That would be a welcome change so I could play some of my favorite games with my friends after they properly learn without feeling like I'm dragging them around
Some things I really dislike in tutorials is when they show me everything but restricts my movement, sometimes it removes the context for me, the other one is the pacing of the tutorial, when it's so slow that I get bored out of my mind.
I get that, because how does it make sense to NOT let the player experiment with the mechanics you're teaching them in the beginning, it's what they'll end up doing and part of what will have them understand in the end, so why restrict them?
If you want a player to learn how to jump you shouldn't lock them in place until they hit the button. You should make sure the path is elevated so you can still run around but if you want to continue you'll have to jump. I believe the same applies to most game mechanics
@@mekannatarry1929 most games do this: *Has a very long tutorial, split into 16 parts, each of them telling what a button does, but when its teaching you about the population panel, all other buttons disappear. You get the idea.* "Have fun memorizing every button, where they are, and what they do." Seriously though. I learn like this: "hmm, the strange button next to the rabbit button is food. Got it." Not like this: "hmm, the tutorial is over. I remember exactly what it said and what everything does. I have superhuman memory afterall."
Speed is what kills it for me about 70% of the time...the other 30% is loss of control. The only time loss of control doesn't bother me is when they integrate the tutorial into a dream/story/experience sequence where it's more like a quick time event thing where a lot of your time is spent focusing on the story unfolding and you interact with it a little. That also tends to help with pacing a ton. Many games really need to implement speed/difficulty options in their tutorials (Don't play many games? Click here....game every day? Click here...etc) I want to quit a game and play something else when I have to go through a 20 minute tutorial where my agency is practically nothing and I have to have some narrator tell me super basic things for half of it that could be said in about 30 seconds.
It would be great if games also had a 'welcome back' tutorial. We've all came back to a game having no clue where we are, what we are supposed to do, or how the controls work.
I feel like Space Engineers does, except it's always on. Every couple of minutes it'll pop up a box reminding you how to do something basic, like move, fly, or refill your hydrogen. Useful if you've forgotten how to play. Little bothersome if you've been playing it a few days and would rather it work up to something more advanced and useful.
Yes, this, so much this. And also a way to leave yourself notes. I tried getting back to a CK 3 campaign after months, and was like: who's that, what was I doing, who are my friends, who are my enemies, aaaah, I don't remember anything I was doing when I quit the game last time.
This is my issue too. Loads of games I had to take a long break for and then came back and realized I'm unable to play it because I forgot the controls, plot and so on and have no way to revisit it without restarting the game.
As someone who loves complex games, I agree that their tutorials are often an absolute chore. So much so, that most of the time I don't even bother with them - I just watch a bit of a let's play of the game, see how the game works and the thought process of someone experienced, and then I jump straight into the normal game. If there's anything I don't know after that, I usually either try to figure it out on my own or look it up in a wiki/forum.
I think part of the problem is that these games attract players that share your mindset - they learn how stuff works by just fucking around with it. However, these games definitely lose many other types of players because they're not used to teaching them
Yah I remember playing civ6 and got tired of the tutorial because it felt so linear. When the game actually started I didn’t know what to do so I built up my army as quickly as possible and attacked one of my neighbors who turned out to be the strongest civilization on the map. When I declared war I had just unlocked a catapult when the war ended I had finish building my first catapult and had lost my entire army. The game never taught me how to not fall behind and how to manage my resources. Every civilization around me was so ahead that when I had canons they had planes when I had planes they had apcs and when I had apcs they had death robots. The only reason I didn’t lose was because I stayed isolated and allied with some strong allies by giving them resources. Which then made me poor and lead to revolt which made me make more troops to fight them and just spend all my time trying to not lose. Every new city I would build would always fall way behind and I wouldn’t know why. While all my neighbors had 8 city’s that were all doing amazing I only had 3 which 2 of where useless. Another country eventually declared war and killed all my units that I had belt up for 70 rounds with one 1 apc.
Yeah but the problem with this is you had to look outside of the game in the first place to learn how to play the game itself. Games should teach you how to play them rather than going to someone else who's played 5000 hours and then following up with wiki homework. There's a reason why people find it so hard to get into grand strategy games like these.
Something interesting I was waiting to see pop up was learning styles such as "visual" "aural" "kinesthetic" and so on. It was a big part of a research project I did for making digital anatomical models for uni students and early on in development I was always trying to cater to learning styles. That is until my supervisor pointed me towards some learning theory and pedagogical studies that indicated that the way we learn best isn't dictated by some magical style. It turns out learning style theory is quite baseless (it was initially just an observer's guestimate of how children responded to different objects in a classroom), but we prefer learning through the medium which communicates the information most effectively. Taking this perspective to my project led me to ask questions of "how is the information best conveyed" rather than "how would 'x' learner student respond to this". So sometimes a visual aide is just intrinsically *better* than text, and conversely a quick splash of text can do much better than a busy visual!
I’m so glad we moved away from that kind of style. I’m a former secondary school/college (the British sense of the word, ergo not university) teacher. My teaching degree (PGCE) was completed just over a decade ago and the tutors were OBSESSED with visual, aural, kinaesthetic, etc. and I found it to be such…well, it was kind of bollocks. I had to accept it as that was the pedagogical wisdom at the time but it was only a couple of years after I finished that, a friend of mine did their teaching degree. However, they mentioned that the syllabus made very little reference to those learning styles during their experience.
There's a Veritasium video about this: Where he asks people to memorise some pictures on some cards, but the people who remembered the most weren't so-called "Visual learners". Instead, they were people who employed memory techniques.
To be honest i prefer when games show not tell as in by level design or being really subtle such as the one for Super Metroid like how you are taught how to wall jump for the first time you mimic bird creatures that are in the back ground. And in A Link to the Past there is literally no tutorial and if you need any hints look around you as it is literally built into the level design of the game itself unless you are doing things out of order which you can after the first dungeon but point is i believe a great game teaches you as you play but is not letting you know that it is teaching you. Its what makes old games actually fun compared to games these days especially RPGs (Looking at you Xenoblade chronicles 3 I DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING FORCED TUTORIALS). Like even if i never played a fucking RPG in my life i don't want a Tutorial being forced down my fucking throat especially one that pretty much is 3 hours long like I DON'T GOVE A FUCK LET ME FUCKING SKIP THESE FUCKING THINGS. Yeah Tutorials in RPGs are fucking long if you can't skip them, its like "WHAT AM I PLAYING YUGIOH?" i am not going to read the fucking invasive useless text and forced combat especially since i am not going to fucking remember it anyway as i am UNFUCKINGINTERESTED in anything a fucking tutorial has to say unless i search for it myself Like sure i get wanting new players not missing out on how the controls work but GIVE A FUCKING OPTION TO SKIP THEM
Thanks so much for the Mini Metro shout out! It was an interesting design exercise in trying to blend the game's minimalist UI with rolling out info to the player at a gentle pace and we are so lucky that it ended up working out so harmoniously. Great video as always!
@@tommo7802 And for any real game you can even find an infinite sequence of rational games converging to it which thankfully means you don't have to play uncountably many games to experience them all, you've just got to play all the rational ones
I actually sometimes have a problem with drip-fed tutorials, and it's when a game has times where you _could_ make use of a mechanic if you had access to it, but your options and opportunities are limited artificially because the game hasn't given you the tutorial for it yet. Persona 5 Strikers is a good example of a game that falls victim to this at the very beginning, because you start the first _real_ level without the ability to use cover points or ambushes, instead relying on manually placing yourself outside of an enemy's line of sight and waiting until they turn around before quickly running into them from behind to get a back attack. This makes the beginning of the game _way_ harder until you're finally given the ability to use cover points, at which point that same intimidating opening room becomes a cakewalk. Maybe this is intended in that game's case. An even better example is the combat systems that Tales of Berseria insists on dripfeeding you throughout the entire game, making the combat linear, boring, and restrictive until the game finally deigns to give you its actual depth piece by piece after certain boss fights. It can be frustrating not having the option to just turn those tutorials off or tell it to give them to you all at once at the beginning so you can fully experience the _entire_ game rather than being effectively gimped until the last third. I actually have an oddly similar problem with games that lock cosmetics behind story progression (for example, modern Pokémon games): by the time you can actually make your character look the way you want them to look, all the cutscenes that would really emphasize those looks have already been and gone.
I have this problem with Magicka. I get stuck in a level and can't go up. What would help me a lot was a speels that'd be unblocked later. I could unblock speels on multiplayer, except that my sister always get the speels before me.
I feel you, it's particularly irritating in a new game plus when you've got to wait to use key game-play elements until you've reached a certain point in the story and watched the bloody tutorial.
@@charlespentrose7834 the biggest offender I've played recently is Fallen Order. They even added an NG+, but all you keep is cosmetics and such, no powers. Not even the points you spent on powers previously.
Yeah a drip fed tutorial approach can work well if the mechanics allow it, but the truth of it is that's just not always the case due to most games not really being designed to be compelling when many of the features are yet to be added.
One thing that Ghost of Tsushima did that I really appreciated was that every time you picked up a tried some new lethal ghost tool, you would get a cutscene that explains why such a tool is dishonorable, followed by Jin apologizing to his uncle for feeling that he needs to do so to defeat the mongols. There's a lot of emphasis in games on tutorials explaining mechanics, but I believe there to to a lot of room to explore with games that attempt to explain both the lore of the world and the rules of the world at the same time.
Yet there aren't major consequences for using them (beside explaining why the ending happens...). You are considerate "Dishonored" even if you never use them after the tutorial; ore you can exploit them without consequences. Love the game, but was kind of let down by this.
One thing a lot of games do that really helps with the learning curve is having “simple” and “advanced” configurations that change how much granular control you have over the system. So when I started playing Civ V I would just let each city automatically assign resources to production, food, science, etc., but as I understood the game better I could tell each city what to focus on, and as I understood even better I could assign each citizen to specific slots to get the precise balance I wanted.
Following that, you also need to have the ability for old players to not be dragged down by the tutorial, In the Civ V example it's good and all that the complex tools got re-added eventually, but that probably pushed off some veteran players. Along with that you got games like Pokemon. All in all, their tutorials are pretty good for first-time players, however many people who've played since rby or even those just doing a repeat playthrough really suffer through the 2 hours of talk to the professor, get the pokemon, pokeball tutorial, learn how pokecenters work, "hi im your rival," look at the box legendary, here's the first gym, you need this kind of pokemon to beat the gym leader, so on.
Pokemon has a little more issues than that, the tutorials aren't even that good for first time players. They stop at the very basics, and tend to leave out big parts of the battle system, or only mention them in vague terms such as "if you use a super effective attack/use an attack of the same type of your pokemon/have an attack boost, you will do more damage". But such vague statements don't actually help you to decide if, against a certain opponent, you should use a STAB attack that isn't super effective or should use a non-STAB super effective attack, for instance. They give you the actual numbers in math class in scarlet/violet, but I think it is the first time the info was actually easy to find in the game. Of course, it's not information that you need right away, but not giving it at all does the game a disservice. In truth, that kind of information is completely unnecessary, because in a lot of cases, you can go really far in the game, and even win it, without understanding much about the combat system. But that's also a bad thing. Sure, young kids won't mind and will be very happy to crush champion after champion with overleveled pokemons, but older newcomers to the series will quickly realise that any attempt to actually learn the subtleties of the system are useless, and because they don't need to put it to practice, it's much harder to remember. So they end up being dissatisfied of the simplicity of the battle system that they experience, knowing it could be better than that, but unable to grasp the most complex mechanism because the game isn't interested in teaching them all that much in game. Putting all the basic info in extremely detailed and unskippable form in the beginning, and then barely anything sprinkled among random NPCs for the rest of the game is really not ideal, for anyone. It's probably not easy to accommodate such a large and diverse audience, and they have been trying some stuff, but so far, it isn't particularly effective.
@@_narrows I couldn't place the image, but that isn't peculiar to me. Does the 9 dots that represents a menu indicate anything in particular to you? If you didn't know what a Floppy Disk was, and saw the save icon all your life in digital media (say you are 15 years old) would you presume that the icon depicts something in particular? Not accusing you or anything, but you could consider the filter depicting a funnel, in my case, an instance of perceived largely arbitrary icon crafting/selection. You could liken this to Playstation's X O Square Triangle, where the symbols apparently lack any innate meaning, but were purportedly designed to have particular universal application that I personally wouldn't call intuitive.
@@TPandaManT I appreciate this quality response. Yeah that makes sense; personally I remember making the connection seeing my grandpa using a funnel while working on a car as a kid, so I suppose never experiencing something similar isn't unlikely. If we're thinking of the same thing, I've always interpreted the nine dots/squares as an array of button or icons, which I believe was intuitive. The Playstation buttons on the other hand, I agree. I've never viewed their intended meaning as anything more than trivia, due to the unintuitiveness.
Great video. I might add a warning to, never make the "Driver tutorial" mistake. Never make your tutorial so hard to do, that the game is completely unplayable.
Oh yeah, I think I remember that. It put you on a giant parking floor inside a building and taught you to do different maneuvers, but at the end gave you a hard requirement to do a lot of hard to pull off maneuvers all within a time limit (like a few minutes or so). Back in highschool someone had sneaked that game into schools computers and many school breaks were spent taking turns trying to beat that tutorial.
@@mattdavisgames A lot of different games have this problem, most notably Rivals of Aether (it force-teaches you how to do shit like Reverse Aerial Rushes which are literally impossible when playing on a keyboard. Mercifully these tutorials can be skipped, though you miss out on unlocking the Tutorial Grid X, THE BEST GODDAMN STAGE IN THE GAME) and the character combo tutorials or whatever they're called in Street Fighter 4
small QoL suggestion: keep the game titles on screen the whole time. I often get absorbed watching the game then have to skip back because I want to know what it was (I don't play many games).
I’ve been playing Splatoon 3 recently and I love the way they use the story mode campaign as a tutorial. Splatoon may not be a city builder, but it is a team pvp game, which means you’ll inevitably lose over and over again during the process of learning the game, and that can be frustrating. By having a single player campaign with levels that focus on a single mechanic at a time, almost treating it like a puzzle game, players are slowly but surely introduced to and made familiar with the many, many mechanics the game contains, all while being led along by the promise of story progression.
Love your videos Mark. My team and I are working on our first video game which will be historical strategy, so this video is extremely useful for us! :)
@@KarmasAB123 Nowhere near launch yet. Released within the year or very early next year. However we do have a discord for the prototype of the game on tabletop, but the rules and rulebook are being overhauled.
@@buddermonger2000 Anywhere I can go to track it? Love strategy games and I find Dev's first foray into it usually come with a lot of interesting changed and ideas,
Introducing UI elements slowly would make it a lot better for new players, when you start the tutorial campaign having all ui elements hidden other than the one currently being explained and the ones previously introduced would go a long way to avoid overwhelming people
Thats the problem, the game wasn't made with the tutorial in mind. They created the game with a lot of complex features and only added a tutorial after that. What this video is saying, is that it's worth thinking about the tutorial while making the base game.
In games like that you just need one fairly easy starting nation that players can bumble through following events and feel like they are progressing even if they don't understand all the mechanics. I never played CK much so I don't know if it has something like this but in Vicky II there was Prussia, and easy nation that was both powerful and limited in ways that made it easy to succeed at even if you had little idea about how the mechanics worked and you just followed the quest chain and tried to fix problems as they come up.
The "click here, yes, yes, now click there" kind of tutorials are bad and ineffective for exactly the same reason that "do this symbol manipulation, yes yes, now write this other symbol" is a terrible way to teach maths. Sincerely, a maths educator.
This. I hate when the game tutorial is "click here, click there" when I can click ONLY on those spots. After this type of tutorial I often blank out. Please game devs, tell me WHY this is a good move and WHY those other moves are bad and then let me do them anyway.
Strategy games are mostly clicking. Should they say don't click? Total war and civ games have pretty good tutorials. They don't just say click,they say click here if u wanna do this.
@@hieroprotoganist3440 It's how you present it. Explaining the *what* isn't as important as explaining the *why.* Telling a player "Put X at Y" isn't doing anything useful for later on. "Put X at Y, here's why" is better, but still doesn't really explain much. "You need Z, which can be gotten with X [highlight X]. A good place to put X is at Y, because A." is much better. Instead of saying "Build a storage building here", a much better way to put it is "You'll need more resource capacity to build that temple you're trying to make, the storage building can be used to increase your capacity. It's a good idea to place storage buildings near where resources are gathered so that your workers don't waste as much time walking back and forth." You explain what they need to do, why and when they need to do it, how to do it, the best way to do it, and _why_ that's the best way to do it. Saying "Do X" only tells them what to do. It doesn't tell them when they should do that action again, or why they did it, or how it helps them.
I 100% agree with the intuitive suggestion. I hate reading through text walls, so I'll often skip tutorials and fumble around trying to figure it out. It's how I learned AOE, Civ and Total War. I've missed some important mechanics in all of those, but it was a whole lot more engaging and I don't regret it!
forget about the in game tutorial, it was useless. Always Watch a beginner guide on UA-cam and read tips on Reddit. it's easier to watch a demonstration video, and supplement your game knowledge with Tips from other player. never play the game head on without informing yourself first it will let you get up to speed 200x faster than having to follow the tutorial without any context. basically you'll be able to get 60% of the game mechanic by watching a single 20 Minute video. which is crazy fast. Zero Frustration, zero stress.
@@an2939 this one music teacher gave us an hour and a half talk about how we "wont be able to achieve anything in life" after we told her we didn't remember the timing of each musical note, that was great
As a professor who studies this type of thing, you are 100% right. Not only that, I think the two fields of education research and game design have a LOT we can learn from one another to improve both fields, maybe drastically imho.
Dwarf Fortress leans really heavily on the real-world interactions thing Mark brings up. I've watched some streamers play it, and their plan / execution narration makes it sounds REALLY intuitive.... once you understand how the basic interface works, that is.
@@GameDevYal Oh, absolutely. It's just that, with so many possible instructions, any interface is going to look like a mess. And the graphics certainly don't help to make anything easy to recognise to newcomers.
I love how DF's help screen literally is 2-3 sentences telling you to look up stuff on the wiki. And to be fair, with a game of this complexity that's the only right thing to do. Not only because it would take an insane effort to somehow put this content into the game and keep it up to date, but also a wiki is great at letting people do stuff in their own tempo. Don't want to learn about wells for now because you've got a miasma problem? That's fine (and FUN)
In my job I teach python to a subset of the scientific community, the reason I mention this is that many of your videos echo with me and help me in my job. Everything from accessibility and keeping players (students) engaged translates really well to online tech teaching. This is awesome content, thanks for sharing it.
Interesting thing: we were having a conversation about a certain type of player at _Dungeons & Dragons_ tables: the player that never learns the game. And I think the "investment vs. willingness to learn" is really key to this. I might try to do this more often with new players.
9:00 the stripped down version for easier settings reminds me of the way difficulty worked in Perfect Dark. Harder settings have more objectives and expect more from you.
18:40 Funnily enough, Minecraft greatly benefitted from the fact that it was virtually unlearnable without Google/UA-cam, as that forced people to build a community to help each other out and thereby market the game to a greater audience. It may have never seen the level of success it is known for today if it included a proper tutorial or a built-in wiki.
Honestly I'd argue it's the other way around. Because it's the sort of building game where people want to show off what they've made, a community was encouraged to be built which in turn made people googling for stuff not a problem. In particular, the game got somewhat popular before survival mode was created, so there wasn't anything to learn to keep people out, it was just building cool stuff, and then by the time there was stuff to be learning the community was pretty much already there.
Also minecraft has the plus of you not having any preset goals. If you'd need to Google in the mid of a raging battle, that'd be bad, but my first minecraft world was creative to learn the controls etc.
@@jan-lukas "If you'd need to Google in the mid of a raging battle" - You have no idea how tense the battles in Minecraft Beta were. But you're right, I never had to google anything during them. :)
@@kibo7838 this, basically. it was already popular before survival, and even after, survival was basic enough at the start that you could intuit most of the crafting recipes. and then they slowly added more complexity, not unlike what GMTK mentioned with adding more mechanics over time
I remember when I started playing cities Skylines. And I had a traffic jam that I could not fix, nothing worked. So I went to the internet and found that there was whole community of players researching how to fix it. There was a huge wiki on roads and jams, and different practical and theoretical solutions. I went and tried a couple and then ran out of money, had a lot of fun though.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri exactly implements one of your suggestions. On the lowest difficulties it removes some of the mechanics, and adds them back in on higher difficulties.
The original Theme Park did exactly the same. In Sandbox mode it just involved placing shops and rides and making a profit. On the 'hardest' difficulty you had to buy stock for said shops, manage employee union negotiations and deal in your own shares and shorting competitors.
@@bohemiandude That's pretty cool, like if you just want to relax and build something for fun you can take those more involved elements off and there you go.
Hmm, I only played Alpha Centauri on Citizen, maybe one higher when I felt spicy, but I do remember going through the menus and finding windows with no idea what they did, like the politics menu; all I ever knew what to do in there was get the Gaia symbol in the green for the chance to recruit mindworms. I also remember my Terraformers could build an "airbase" but directly telling them to do it, never resulted in anything being built, nor an error. Is that something for higher levels, or just the expansion. And now I remember one of the higher difficulty mechanics was Prototype units, right? +50% stats for being the first unit of its make on Planet? All this reminiscing kind of makes me want to pop it back in again. Locusts of Chiron, all the way.
"Playtest your tutorials" Nintendo does this. A leak of unused levels in NSMBU Deluxe has a ton of unused early versions of 1-1. The only other level that has as many unused versions is _Walking Piranha Plants!_ for some reason.
I've also seen the advice to design the first level in the game last. Because at that point you know much better what's important in the later stages and are a better level designer for that game than at the start of the project.
Project Winter teaches in a manner similar to what you mentioned at around 7:40. They have a "Basic" mode that is the actual game, just stripped of the more complex parts. It's the exact same game, just simplified to help beginners understand the core mechanics before they start worrying about the differences between less important game features. Speaking as a beginner to that game, I found it INCREDIBLY useful, and it's the only reason I didn't quit that game from being too overwhelmed at the start.
@@Muffinmurdurer reasonable minds may differ. It was definitely slow paced but I at least thought it gave a good sense of the world and role playing mechanics
Breaking up the learning into multiple short runs going for easy achievements was the best way I found for me to learn EU4. It did require some research to decide which challenges to set for myself and how to approach them, but it made conquering learning the brunt of the game more manageable and measurable
@@the4thsteve27 Europa Universalis 4. As someone with over 3,500 hours in the game and all the DLC, please don't play it. You'll either get a gimped and downright unplayable experience trying to play without the DLC's or you spend $300 on what's effectively a shiny new button to click with no meaningful difference added to the game other than to stack ever escalating bonuses or fix the lead dev's butthurt every time he's beaten in a dev clash because they balance a majority single-player game around what 4% of the player base thinks is meta.
I think one of my favourite tutorials are the plains levels from Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove. Short and sweet levels that teach you not just the movement but how levels work and the structure of the games plays out.
During a replay, I realized just how incredible the plains levels are. On the second-to-last screen of King Knight's first level, there's a set of stairs with bugs atop them and a piece of gold in the wall above, along with a pit immediately to it's right with a trail of gold over it. The platform is just wide enough to be difficult to drop down on without taking damage, and you definitely want gold, so you dash into the wall, throwing you into a spin that allows you to kill that first bug. Going with the flow, you land on the next bug, showing that you're encouraged to link attacks, and through the previous screen displaying your dash returning upon hitting an enemy (which was poorly tutorialized, unfortunately), you are then encouraged to dash over the pit. With a small amoung of geometry, two bugs, and 4 pieces of gold, it naturally taught you the general flow of the rest of the game; dash into terrain to pogo on enemies and keep moving forward through the air.This all happens with three button presses (jump, dash, dash) and moving to the right. It taught you to get into a flow, to link attacks and platforming in a fluid fashion. It's frankly astounding how many parts of that game are set up for exactly these kinds of things.
This is honestly why I usually only pick up these kinds of games if my friends are into them. Games like this are easier taught by a friend, especially in games like EU4 that have mechanics that will only slightly hamper you if you ignore them in the early years, so that way you can learn the fun bits early and get a feel for stuff like development, buildings, and estates later as you play and explore.
Yeah. Dwarf Fortress is normally a nightmare to learn, but with my dad, a longtime player, over my shoulder for the first few hours, I was able to pick up the basics easily enough and figure out more complex systems slowly, at my own pace, with both the wiki, in-game resources, and just expirimentation.
AoE 2's campaign imo is a near-perfect strategy tutorial. You literally start off with a single unit that can really just move and then you slowly are introduced to more and more aspects of the game. It's crazy, AoE2 managed to teach me when I was at the age of like 5 to play the game while most other games were way too complex for me.
I think something that AoE2's tutorial campaign does really well is keeping you invested. The hammy, jovial voice-acting and vivid illustrations of sufferin' Scots makes you care about working with the narrator and seeing this through to the end. "Of course, Mr. Scottish Narrator Man, I'll build five villagers. Anything for you and William Wallace!" I think that's something that other RTSes really struggle with in their tutorials. StarCraft 1 throws you into a "tech demo" for terran tech and WarCraft 3 puts you in control of orc chieftain Thrall as he wakes up from a prophetic dream. It's some nice in-universe flavoring, sure, and both those campaigns eventually become quite compelling in their own ways. But it's all rather esoteric compared to something as grounded and shockingly compelling as AoE2 telling you "here's some struggling Scots, it's your job to command and save them."
@@cromanticheer Thrall was more relatable than AoE2 tutorial, sorry. And I hate orcs. I quit the AoE tutorial and just played Skirmish, since I already was well versed in RTS.
@@OhNoTheFace I don't know anything about that, but I just learn better through kinaesthetic learning, it's why Science was my favourite and best subject at school, and why I'm surprised I even got a GCSE in English or Religious Edication(especially RE since I answered like 3 Questions one of them being my Name, I guess to get U I'd have had to not answer anything). Give me the keys and talk me through it, don't throw the 500 page manual at me and expect to remember anything by the time I reach the end, because chances are I'm turning the game off and playing something more fun, like FFII.
Another game that I think makes for an interesting case in terms of its tutorial is Darkest Dungeon. Not only that its initial learning curve is well-balanced by making players get used to the game's control scheme and mechanics through a short and simple quest (as Mark said, kinaesthetic learning), but it also slowly unlocks more and more facilities, so you don't get overwhelmed by having to manage your money, stress, and hero level.
Also, do not restrict access from menu options (like music/sound controls) until the end of the tutorial, especially if your tutorial spans multiple levels
An idea for making an "easy mode" by removing some systems from the experience: if your game has some AI built in, give the player an (AI) assistant that handles some tasks. This can be integrated into the story: a king has advisers who in easy mode are trusted with decision-making, etc. If your AI can do this, you don't have to plan difficulty levels from the get-go.
I find that in many of my favourite games, knowledge of the complex systems is not needed for lower-level play, but becomes all but required for higher difficulties. This means the full experience is never outright denied to the player, but they can avail themselves of it at their discretion. I remember someone from Platinum describing the medium difficulty of one of their games as a long tutorial so that the game can be replayed on higher difficulties, probably as NG+.
An alternative could be to give players high-level choices. For example, there could be 2 or 3 main ways to manage your army, and you could prompt the player to choose one of them and then the AI would kick in. Bonus points if the game explains why the AI is doing (or not doing) these actions in relation to the strategy you asked them to perform.
If I recall correctly, hearts of iron 3 had an AI option for almost every system in the game, so you could manually control what you wanted, and let an AI control the parts you didn't want to worry about.
@@saldor0108 And in a grand strategy game that is kind of how I prefer it to be. If the AI is at least semi competent, then I as the spirit of the nation or whatever don't want to be controlling every division by hand since I have bigger fish to fry.
I think hbomberguy said it best, paraphrasing: "The answer to the question 'Where should our story begin?' being 'At our main character's birth' is the joke answer to that question" Fallout 3's tutorial is good in the sense that it probably gets the mechanics of the game across to many people. It just takes, what, an hour to do so (from memory)? It's insanely tedious.
Honestly, I absolutely looove figuring games out by myself. A tutorial is good for giving me the basics but finding out other stuff by myself is something I enjoy a lot, even when I eventually have to look up a specific guide or learn it from someone else. Quite love doing that
This got me thinking about how life coukd be if we sprinkled having to go to school throughout life instead of smooshing it in our lives immediately and for a long time.
@@jasonfurumetarualkemisto5917 probably something like having work study programs periodically while in school to see real work applications for things you have been learning in class that adults are using daily.
Dude, this is amazing. As a user researcher in the gaming industry, I was watching your video with happy tears in my eyes. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. I watched it 2 times in a row. Will share it 'everywhere', and will watch it at least few more times. The best bulk of FTUE and UX tips and tricks so far!!!
But instead they did (or let players do) something really interesting. Basically, the game lives because of the community. By making the chat the only thing accessible to everyone to gather informations, trade, befriend, etc. and creating a shitload of possibilities for everything, they made the players involved and wanting to know more, to try more, to get more. Call it lazy (and at this point, I'm sure they'd deserve it more than a bit :p ) but I find it very interesting.
@@HigaaraEnd I don't know if having a chat feature and relying on people should be called interesting. I sure as hell stopped playing because of how poorly the game explains everything.
@@Jonkiller10 it is true that it is not a good thing for most of the audience but it makes a certain niche of players stick around. And if Warframe isn't a perfect example of a niche game, idk what is
One of my favorite things about Civ 6 is that the tutorial is really basic but you are encouraged to explore the various mechanics through eurekas, inspirations, and city state quests. The world is wide open and these things give you something to focus on while you learn the ropes. As you increase in difficulty, you need to focus your attention but you wouldn't know what to focus on without trying out the various mechanics.
For CK3, I found that playing for just a single life time as an OP character and then a regular character of each build type really helped me learn the intricacies of how certain mechanics work, as well as what skills were more or less important for certain goals I might want to accomplish. I feel like a short 1 lifetime mode with premade builds might really help people just starting out.
Same for me, a good character prevents helps offset dumb mistakes from a lack of knowledge but giving you stronger overall buffs. And this offsets frustration letting me Learn easier what's happening.
Teaching method aside, if someone doesn't have the patience to sit through the tutorial, they will definitely not have the patience to play it. I doubt GMTK would like to sit there for 1 hour so that his young character's regency ends and he can finally make decisions for his realm on his own just to be met with a million game popups where he has to click OK to unpause the game (idk if they fixed that in CK3, but it's the worst part of CK2 and EU IV)
We need some positive feedback too. Alerting you when you're about to do something stupid only teaches how *not* to play the game. Perhaps we could offload some of the work to a computer-controlled character to immediately demonstrate the impact of your decision without needing you to make the relevant actions to put it into motion. So after learning unit counters in a strategy game, you could be asked to synthesize it by building an army of your choosing based on a visible enemy composition. Once you're satisfied, you send them to an AI commander, who proceeds to use them in whatever way they deem optimal based on how the most intelligent AI profile is programmed. The camera auto-pans to the battle, and you get immediate feedback on how well your unit composition fared without needing to understand how to position them, time their abilities, cycle their frontlines, or any of the other micromanagement that comes with the minutia of battle
Idk about other strategy games but the AI in total warhammer does not know how to use units at all other than, keep archers in the back and cycle charge cavalry units. So giving command of your units to an AI is probably not an effective visualizer of how unit counters work since all the AI does is hurl them against eachother. AI in that game has to even use blatant cheats to stand a chance against a decent player.
I think that would be great for obvious things, like stuff that it makes no sense not to do cuz it’s so good should def be reinforced, maybe even with a hint at how they could improve further, only problem being the developers would need to know what’s good in their game
@@invenblocker I happened to just find it funny that Hop still thinks it's amazing that I, the Pokemon champion of the Galar region, do in fact know about type advantages/disadvantages. And it's honestly designed to be played by very small kids so we as adults that happen to like those games just have to live with some hand holding.
It was the first time for me to understand that different mouse buttons have different functions. Also I could not find the quit game button on the menu because it was placed on the top and I was just assuming it was the title and not a pressable button.
I think a big part of the difficulty with designing a tutorial in complex strategy games is that most of the enjoyment comes from how all the different systems interact, and if you try to spread the mechanics and tutorials for them throughout the game the way you might in a puzzle game like Portal so that the player can play the "real game" without sitting through a long tutorial first, you are instead just making them play a bad version of the game.
That's why I love Bayonetta - when I was stuck I could just practice my combos between loadings. I had all the time I wanted to redo what the game wanted me to do and to hone my skills further.
My only issue with sprinkling tutorial as the game progresses is that it often feels inorganic. Games introduce something new, explain it, then you immediately use it, and then rarely see it again. When done poorly it makes games feel segmented instead of a cohesive experience, and it removes creativity and removes the players need to think
Or when you get close to someting and you're trying to apply something else you've learned and now you made a new tutorial show up that you dont' have time to read? Like exactly what The Witcher 3 does in this video?
Clicked on this video because I wanted to figure out ways to easily teach mechanics for my homemade board games. Turns out I already do the "splitting up tutorials during gameplay" strategy, and for my current project I have a list of alternate rules that either strip down mechanics of the game to make it easier for new players or turn those mechanics up to 11 just in case there's anyone who gets insanely good at it in the future. The only one I didn't think of is UI design, or in my case, the design of the cards and play pieces. For example, the current project I'm working on is a Sonic the Hedgehog themed card game. In most games, Health=Hearts, but in Sonic games, Health=Rings. It's a staple mechanic. My project assumes all players have at least a surface knowledge of Sonic games, but in the case that they don't, I'll make a few quick-reference cards to explain Health=Rings and other mechanics.
My problem with "complex" games' tutorials is that even with all that, they're hardly complete. When i found myself watching hours long playthroughs of Civilization 5 to understand the basics beyond "how the interface works" i decided i didn't like the game *that* much
I have Civilization on the Switch and barely touched it. Never played a Civ game and started to work through the tutorials and just .... stopped. I've been meaning to look up video tutorials on UA-cam, but it annoys me that I have to. It's like they expect every player to be a veteran. A complex game like that needs a good tutorial system. Not like Pokemon that has too much tutorial telling you how to do stuff that doesn't need it. "This is a pokemon mart. You can buy stuff here" It's a mart. I know how they work...
yeah, i think of civ 5 as a game with a couple sets of money, determined by the buildings you build, science, culture, fairh and gold, and those allow you to make changes, altho i think with civ the main minutiae is just knowing what buildings to build, and that’s a good question. just build everything
Civ 5 vanilla is also my first civ game. Although I enjoyed the game a lot thanks to the fantastic visual feedbacks, I didn't understand one of the core mechanics of the game for a long time. That is, the tiles don't get worked if there isn't enough population to support it. I always prioritized production tiles and so built mines instead of farms without realizing I am not working them. It took me a long time to figure out I need 1 citizen per tile and even longer to understand that I could task my citizens from the menu. Happiness and culture were far easier to understand. In fact, I always rushed culture with Stonehenge in my early games because that was the part I understood the most.
Def, it gets even worse for some games, eu4s tutorial and loading tips not only don't tell you how to play but give "advice"/"lessions" that harm the player. And hoi4s tutorial is pretty much just thowing you into a game, paradox games are a great lesson on what NOT to do in tutorials
@@firestar5879 well they do tell you to start as ottomans For the hundred Time Even though you have 1000h in the game and you have like 50% of the trophies. Not to mention the fact that in de facto turtorial you start as spain
I love complex games but I'm dyslexic, 1 in 6 people in the UK have dyslexia but we're a constantly forgotten massive minority, a lot of games, particularly complex ones require reading large blocks of small text that they think is a good idea to put in god dam stylised fonts, making it take ages for me to process any of the information that are trying to give.
@@loturzelrestaurant wait the books font and content is actually written with dyslexics in mind? That's pretty cool given that demigods are supposedly dyslexic
Nothing, for me, beats the tutorial in Breath of the Wild. I remember the first time I woke up in the Great Plateau, and I remember the sheer level of freedom I felt not only in how to go about my objectives, but where I would explore after being freed from the high walls. It was breathtaking stuff, and there are precious few games that instill such magic into the first hours.
My favourite bit at the start was when I had to cross a large gap to get to one of the shrines. After evaluating on how to approach it, I wondered if I could use something as a bridge. Sure enough, there was a tree in range so if you cut from the right side it will fall perfectly. I didn't think about it until later, but the old man can be found cutting trees in that area, and just nearby is his logging hut with an axe. They clearly intended you to use the tree to get across because of the environment, but didn't have to stop me and say "hey, you can cut down trees to make bridges". I will say though, the one thing I got stuck on was how to cook food the first time. It didn't immediately click that I need to first hold the ingredients and then walk up to a cooking pot, instead of just activating the pot to cook as almost every other game does. I don't remember if the old man hints anything about cooking, but that could've been made clearer by having him sit by a pot and say something like "how are you gonna cook with no ingredients out?" That would give you a hint that you need to hold the ingredients to cook without being full on tutorial mode.
@@leetri A big part of why that works is that almost everything in BOTW works and reacts like you would intuitively expect it to. Hit a tree with an axe? Of course the tree falls. Is it made of wood? It'll catch fire. Of course that includes your arrows if you hold them into a fire, why not? Congrats on your fire arrow! Are you holding a big metal thing during a thunderstorm? You bet you are being a lightning rod right now. Is it cold? Holding a flaming sword will keep you warm. I could probably list more examples, but it's been a while since I played the game. The point is, your knowledge of the real world translates a lot to knowledge about the game world (which, if I type it out like that, is pretty much one of the points made in the video).
My first total war game was Rome I, and I have great memories of that tutorial. It starts you off with very few decisions that you have to make, but at the same time you are playing the game right away, to the extent that I've gone back and played the tutorial again even though I had hundreds of hours in the game at that point
Same here. Then I moved on to Medieval II and it was awesome. Didn't play a tutorial because I didn't need to. It's sufficiently more complex, but similar enough to where I could apply my previous knowledge from Rome. Then, I tried Shogun II, and it was a mess. Struggled a bit and gave up. I'm sure it's a great game, but just no. Couldn't do it. And I managed to break through the walls of EU4, CK2 and HOI4, so I don't think it's because I give up easily.
Yeah the DS1 tutorial was great. An entire area just devoted to step-by-step moving you through, starting with a tiny room that makes sure you learn how to do simple actions, and even having you pick up and equip your basic gear. They even give you a little hint for making your (probable) first boss battle easier by teaching you how to plunge attack, though it's unfortunate that plunging on bosses is only really done in those two places.
@@GrimmerPl As a Souls fan I have to disagree: most people expect the game to entertain them, not to be a tool to be manipulated to have fun. People generally don´t make that connection of "Combat is a puzzle to be solved with the tools I have, one of them beeing retrospection through the ability to try as often as I want to". Instead they just think: "wow, this game stinks, let´s play something better (easier)". I think the main issue with tutorializing people on a game that is about making your own decisions, is to keep peoples minds fresh and available, as they will just do, whatever you tell them to do. Fromsoftware does not like the idea, to just follow instructions, I think. Do whatever YOU want, even if its deinstalling the game.
"Here's how you attack" "Here's how you block" "Here's how you dodge" "You heal with this thing" "Ok, that's it, now here's a boss specifically designed to punish your overly passive beginner's playstyle have fun!"
@@gurkenskoppie I mean, I'm only entertained by games if I'm figuring things out, solving things or overcoming challenges. I don't expect a game to be fun if I don't put the effort in to succeed, because my idea of fun involves being faced with a problem and thinking "how do I go about this"? I think that's why I mostly play action games that are known for being "challenging"; seeing my character get chopped to bits in seconds is reassuring to me, because otherwise I often end up thinking "sure, I'm getting by so far, but could this strategy screw me over later in the game? Am I understanding these mechanics correctly?". Getting killed within a minute lets me know that no, I'm not doing it right. That's just me though, we all learn differently.
@@DarshanBhambhani I think the idea is that anyone can pick up the game and get somewhat good at it. But then there is also some really difficult things to keep more advanced player engaged.
@@DarshanBhambhani Fortnite was supposed to be more explorative and have a single player campaign... I will never let anyone mention this game without stating this, it's relevant no matter what the subject is... :/
6:30 - For anyone who doesn't know, the made up fighting game term is "Bivouacing". (He actually states that later on in the vid, but whatevs! :D ) * "Trip Guard" means that you, when landing from a jump, can immediately go into a block to avoid taking damage. Many fighting games have a few frames after landing where you can't immediately attack, but can block - that's a Trip Guard. * "Frame Data" refers to information on how long things take to happen after you attack. You can imagine attacks as general having 3 stages.. a "wind-up" where your character is starting an attack, an "active" period where your attack can actually do damage, and a "cool-down" where your character resets to their original position ready to attack again, as well as the opponent having a certain number of frame of reaction if they block or get hit. Each of those is measured in the number of frames they take to happen; stronger attacks usually taking longer, and have proportionately longer wind-ups and cool-downs where you're open to attack. By studying the frame data of moves, you can figure out how risky or safe they are, and sometimes development specific responses to certain moves (IE "if I block their standing roundhouse, I get out of stun three frames before their cool-down ends, and that's enough time for me to throw out a jab and get a combo started"). Modern games usually let you see the explicit frame data in training modes. * "Happy Birthday" is a term from team games like Marvel vs Capcom where you control one active fighter at a time, and can call in other team members to do single attacks. Sometimes, you might be able to do an attack on an enemy when they've called in a teammate that hits both of them, meaning you're getting in free extra damage against a character who would normally be out of play. It's often seen as the opponent "gifting" you that extra damage, and because you get gifts on your birthday - Happy Birthday. (This culminated in this clip from a Skull Girls tournament, which includes a character Big Band that has a super where the player can mash out tunes - ua-cam.com/video/rZnKAUqwCjA/v-deo.html ) * "Turtling" refers to the strategy of spending a lot of your time crouch-blocking and biding your time for a good chance to hit back. Crouch-blocking usually gives the opponent relatively few options for ways to get a good hit on you, with the tradoff being an obvious reduction in your own mobility. * "Pretzel Motion" refers to a particular special move input used in some fighting games (start with the stick Back, then snap it across and move it into a half circle Forward > Down > Back, then snap it across to Forward again), the idea being that particular motion traces a shape a bit like a knotted pretzel, but is sometimes used more generically to refer to the types of half- and quarter-circles based motions used in a lot of fighting games in general. Bivouacing is a term for sleeping outside without shelter, and AFAIK is not a fighting game term.
By the way, Civ V's approach of breaking up learning works extremely well even if you start the game with the two major expansions activated (like I did). This works because there's a good gap between introducing the mechanics of each expansion. The base game is learned in the early eras. Gods and Kings introduces religion mechanics which only come into significance far later in history (and are also not necessary to learn). Finally, Brave New World is introduced when you're in the Modern Era and have already played a campaign for around ten hours. In my opinion, it's elegantly structured.
17:17 "And play test your tutorials, like, a lot" That's actually an interesting topic. How does one effectively play test a game/tutorial in the first place, given a limited budget? Do I just go out and find some random person who has never played my game and ask them to play it in front of me? Do I hire play testers only to immediately fire them once they've played my game once, because by then they have learned its mechanics and cannot effectively play test anymore? Do I release the game to a limited audience and implement data collection features into my game (disclosed, of course) to find out how well the players understood my game? It honestly seems like an issue that is very hard to approach as an indie dev.
You can ask for you family, friends, go to a forum, game events, anime events, local school ask for permission, stuff like that. AAA can have their test team at any time but that does not mean you can't find people to test your game. Just have a table and ask some questions before start so you know if the person has any knowledge from the type of game you are building or even any game. and if the person plays for 1 minute and says... "Sorry idk what is going on, I don't like game". You can try to help or let the person go. but always take notes.. whatever is the result.
Recruiting playtesters is up there with marketing as something you have to invest time, and at least a little money, into during development. You can reach out broadly to folks who are interested in your game, and then sort them into cohorts based on genre/subject experience. I find it's better to put people together who have similar levels of exp - otherwise new people defer to those with more experience, defeating the purpose.
An ideal situation would be to get a bunch of people of different experience levels to play your tutorial for the first time while recording footage which you can review and discus with them later. Having access to a recording will help you identify problems the testers themselves will have a hard time identifying, for example if your tutorial asks players to navigate to a certain menu and several players click on the wrong button to get there but get it right on the second try they would be unlikely to mention that in verbal or written feedback but you'll be able to see the pattern and might want to change some icons to make them more clear.
An open beta might be a good way to do this, as long as you also gather feedback from players. Daemon X Machina did this effectively by releasing essentially the tutorial and first few missions as a free demo before the game's launch, then a few months later they uploaded a video showing how they changed parts of the game to address the feedback they received.
One of my least favorite things in gaming in general, is restricting EVERYTHING but a super specific path the tutorial wants you to take. This is especially bad when it comes to unskippable tutorials. I have so many games I want to replay but i just can't stomach those first 20-30 minutes of not being able to do ANYTHING but what the tutorial wants me to.
@@NickSchoenfeld going back to any zelda game is like that, TBH. I started Links Awakening remake on switch and when the owl flew in i was like here we go again and had flashbacks to the last time i played it, 20 years ago, and jamming B on my gameboy until he stfu
God, this is what I HATE about Monster Hunter World. The way the campaign is made assumes that every single new start is someone who's completely new to the game, or new to Monster Hunter in general.
A part of this video reminded me of an important lesson I learned while getting a game design degree. I was developing my final game project with a team. I was in charge of making the research system and UI. I placed all the important buttons in the top middle section of the UI; things like "Begin Research" and "Exit". Our teacher recorded his first playtest of the prototype, which ended poorly when he got stuck in the research menu. He could NOT figure out how to exit the menu, despite the big "Exit" button almost center screen. He started spam clicking all over the screen, getting pretty upset, saying that the UI was broken, and the game was unplayable. We got a failing grade.. When we reached out to him and pointed out the "Exit" button he admitted he had not even seen it. (He changed our grade after playtesting again) I learned that most people expect the exit button to be in the top right of the UI because that is where Windows places their close button. I moved the buttons and just to be safe I also added three alternative ways to close the menu; the escape key, pressing the research button again, and clicking the main game screen behind the UI. Sorry for the long read but I look back on this and think its hilarious. I wish I still had the playtest recording!
I'm reminded of Lobotomy Corporation's Manager's Manual, which contains almost all the information the player will need to succeed in a relatively succinct way. However, certain *extremely* important information is delivered before it relevant. I've seen people not realize that the rank of armor is immensely more important than the stats of the armor even though it's stated in the manual that they read. And when you started talking about repeat playthroughs giving more complex tutorials, I was reminded even more of Lobotomy Corporation, which has so much retreading of ground that it's referenced in the story. They could've stated or restated information that's more important for late-game when it actually starts to become a problem. It's a good idea that I haven't seen other people talk about.
I really liked the way the board game "Root: A Game of Woodland Right and Might" did its tutorials, both in its physical and digital versions (which had different tutorializations). The physical version had three different rulebooks: a full detailed set of rules with indexed sub-rules for easy lookup (not intended to be read comprehensively), a "quick rules" rulebook (intended to be read by at least one person), and a "quick tutorial" book (which consisted of two sample rounds for a four-player game, to teach most of the rules of most factions). The "player boards" have good instructions to assist as well. The digital version had a tutorial for each faction that gets you started for a few turns, then tells you to earn some fixed number of points to win. It then has single-player "challenges" if you still don't feel ready that let you understand how things play, and also serve the role of emphasizing various mechanics more at times (so that by the time you're done with them, you've "felt" all the mechanics). In some ways it's different than the complex games indicated here (being a board game), but not entirely - the fact that each faction has its own core mechanics, with the way they are balanced against each other, has some similarity to the many interweaving systems of these complex games.
I've still only had the chance to play that game once, but I really enjoyed it. It's been a while, but if I remember correctly, one thing it does well to help experienced players introduce new players is that certain factions are simpler than others. They're still balanced, but it's easier for a new player to pick up a certain faction on their first game while they're still figuring everything out, then go for a more complex faction on replays once they're more familiar with the basics, similar to the "strip out systems on easier difficulties" method of teaching mentioned in this video. Specifically, I think I was playing the "Vagabond" faction, where you only have to worry about one unit and managing your own stuff, but you have to watch and interact with the other players and thus learn a bit about how they play their more complex factions.
The thing with crusader Kings is There is no real "good way to play" The game is more about learning the game systems so you can do what you want out of it. And as it is not so visual it is really hard to explain these systems. But when you know them it is so godaimn good.
You could make some scripted events, like "all your vassals are upset at you for some reason and will cause you a lot of headache if you don't act now." a few need to be bribed, swayed, threatened,... (Explains the diplomacy systems) one wants his de jure land you are holding (Explains the concept of domain, de jure titles, and shows that giving land is a way to keep vassals loyal) another one wants to have control over a local city you are the liege of for some unknown reason, (Explains the feudalist system, with lieges and vassals, and that to keep an eye out for vassals that shouldn't be yours) one needs to be killed (arguably the most important system, could show the consequences when it goes wrong too...) one needs you to be more pious (Explains piety, how to get it and what effects it can have) one needs you to gain more prestige (explains prestige, how to get it via decisions, its effects,...) And a few will rise up against you regardless. You need to beat them in a war. You conveniently receive a marriage proposal for your son from a neighbor. By accepting it you receive an ally, shows how marrying family members off to other countries will get you an alliance. You eventually beat the traitors, they are sent to your prison, where you can revoke their titles, punish them how you see fit or release them if you feel merciful. I'm fairly certain you can incorporate a lot more of the systems in this little tutorial (lifestyle, developing your domain, technology, raiding, casus belli, tyranny, inheritance,...). By creating a situation where you need to use a system, pointing the player where he can find it and immediately show the consequences of their actions you "show don't tell" the tutorial.
CK3 also locks some of its features behind perks, so you'll do, and thus learn, different things when playing different characters. You probably won't do too much scheming if your character is a do-gooder who throws parties, and once you have a character suited for warfare you might try to look at it more deeply.
I think you could get away with doing scenarios to teach the player certain game aspects. There are some wonderful set pieces you could use to limit the scope of the game a bit to just focus on combat and espionage over a set amount of years, i.e. one of the Scottish wars for independence limiting things to a short set amount of years and just to the countries effected. You could then add in a longer set piece like a couple of the crusades put together or the 100 years war to add in lineage mechanics and letting the player playing king more so than playing warlord. I know it is not a perfect example but with some work I could see something like this working. I know it would help my crusader kings gameplay personally.
Right but at this point they are designing exclusively for folks who are already Paradox fans. But the downside is that they have to work very hard to retain that small base, and get all possible revenue out of them - so that means lots of DLC, and a greater reluctance to moderate the more toxic side of the community. Opening up your game's design to new people can make the experience better for existing players too.
You could but it would probably be more effective to list the reasons why you are a proficient crusader kings player instead. Being able to focus for long periods of time and consume large amounts of information are skills not everyone has and are traits a lot of employers like.
Factorio has a pretty good tutorial imo. It has you start with the basics of mining, smelting and inserters, and slowly moves on to simple base defense, automation of crafting (the basis of the entire game) and then making science, before dropping you into a destroyed base and letting you relatively off the leash and research decently far into the first two sciences, and introducing trains, one of the most important ways of transporting items in the game, without really being too overwhelming. The tutorial is honestly great fun and doubles as a demo. It gets you just far enough that you understand the basic concepts of automating smelters, crafting and research, and pollution and the biters, and then cuts you off before you reach the truly complex parts of the game so you can go into those things in the full experience.
You absolutely summed up my frustrations with 4X tutorials; I remember bouncing off Crusader Kings hard because just how graph heavy and counter intuitive the UI is.
As someone who never played the tutorial for CK2, the use of tool tips and the alert bar at the top got me through my first game. There’s a concept Mark Rosewater, lead designer of magic the gathering calls “lenticular design”; it’s the idea of designing things so that they are read differently to new players vs invested players. I think CK does that fairly well; you can get relatively far by blundering your way through and only learning about systems when they become organically relevant to your play through via reading the tool tips.
@@liampoulton-king7479 That's great for either folks who don't mind frustration or a DIY tutorial experience, but a lot of players don't have enough time+patience for either of those.
@@mandisaw I mean, what I’m trying to get across is that I’m not a person who enjoys trying to intuit oblique mechanics, so the fact that I was able to learn and enjoy Crusader Kings relatively quickly is evidence that it’s mechanics can be discerned quickly enough through tooltips. If one feels incapable of playing a game without knowing exactly how every mechanic works before starting, then it’s a bigger problem. And I agree that CK’s tutorial is garbage. I would just encourage people to try learning through play if they are curious. And if anyone has questions during their game, they can feel free to DM me.
I studied a bit about adult learning last year, and it’s no surprise to learn that adults become very bored very quickly if the thing they’re learning isn’t involving. The bit in the video about investment balanced against a tutorial is absolutely spot-on; nobody will learn anything unless they’re driven to do it for some reason. For me, the best tutorials bar none are found in Portal and Breath of the Wild. They are so seamless and you don’t even know you’re being taught, but at the same time you’re being released to practice your skills on your own terms. It’s never restrictive, or at least it never feels restrictive. I get the most frustrated in games when it’s stopping me every few seconds to explain a complex mechanic (usually a static menu) which I’ll never remember by the time I need to actually use it. Just let me go! BotW is masterful at this, by not even letting you out of the cave until you can climb, then giving you a tiny sandbox to explore, with the /suggestion/ of a direction to go, and gradually making that sandbox bigger as you follow the path. The developers of Portal found the perfect balance between teaching basics then then gradually ramping up the challenge. Press button to open door. Now put cube on switch to open door. Now press button to get cube to do the thing, etc. Eventually you’re flying through the air and throwing cubes at turrets to get past the obstacles. In BotW you’re throwing book cases at Lynels and flying through the air while clinging to rocks! One thing that might hold tutorials back the most is the need to assess gamers as competent at a task before showing them the next thing. Back to Portal, you need to open a few doors before you’re even shown your first portal gun. In that time the developer has to teach you how to look, how to move, how to interact, and how to carry stuff. You literally cannot progress through the game unless you are able to master these skills, and what’s more, while these seem like easy FPS skills to seasoned players, the game has to assume that you’ve never played any video games at all. The assessment there is built into the game itself, so therefore it’s a fully interactive and automatic assessment. In BotW on the starting plateau there’s a moment where you need to go to a frosty area, and you’re given the choice to either earn some warm clothes, or brew a meal that gives Link the ability to withstand cooler temperatures for a limited time. The game here is letting you decide, and if you complete the task then you’re deemed competent to travel to frozen climates and survive. You will have then demonstrated your ability to 1) make a choice, 2) apply the appropriate items at the right time and place, and 3) survive and return to safety. That’s quite a complex set of tasks, and once again the assessment is built into the game as part of the organic experience. The big question is: how do you assess players to be able to play text- and menu-heavy games like city builders and RTSs? Devs need to assume complete innocence of any gameplay mechanics while not comping across as condescending to seasoned gamers; it can be safely assumed that one knows how to use a computer if they can turn it on and launch the game to begin with, so you don’t need to tell them what a mouse is at first. Players respond well to narrative interactions (for example, one can be tasked by an existing in-game master like the military general with collecting wood for a while) which can then lead to a narrative-driven reason to progress (the general must take the army to defend the city - I know wood collecting is boring but please keep doing it because it’s important) which then leads to an event that causes hardship to be overcome (the general and half his army have been killed, please help!) leading to new possibilities (we need to you help rebuild the barracks) before a grand opportunity opens up (take this platoon of soldiers and establish a new outpost).
Biggest info in this video: "CK3 have a tutorial!" O.O My way to PDX game is: watch some lets plays, press some buttons, read some tooltips, restart and repeat.
That used to be the only realistic way to learn their games, but they've gotten a lot better at tutorials and tooltips. Trying to learn CK2 without DLC after it all came out was a fucking nightmare. The UI is stuffed with references to mechanics you haven't bought, the tutorial hasn't been updated in 12 years, buttons are nearly indistinguishable from decoration, the language is archaic and unexplained, income numbers are monthly some times and yearly others with no real indication which is which. In CK2 characters have a symbol of... something? and when you hover over it the text says: Craven. In CK3 there's another weird symbol and the text says: Craven. This character is a coward, less likely to defy their liege and take risks. And then if you hover over "liege" it explains what that means! Imagine if an fps game told you "If your intention is to ejaculate an object of excellent ballistic quality with the capacity to cause harm on man, beast, and indeed object, depress the leftmost piece atop the mouse which engages a mechanism" instead of "Left click to shoot"
That's kinda how i learned Stellaris after playing 1000's hours of HoI4, which i learned through a Germany game with cheats so that i learn what does what. After that i learned i can mod stuff, and there i learned all the weird mechanics to break the game (it was during 1.5.4) and now i am trynig to rush mech production while creating collaboration govs to get those compliance points.
@@gildedphoenix u get compliance by creating collaboration government? I never knew that I thought they were only to help capitulate America or USSR faster endgame.
@@NaderBerbish you get compliance by doing the Collaborationist spy missions. And you can get 90% compliance if you can successfully complete at least two of them. (But they take half a year to prepare and another half to run it. As Germany, you wanna run this on all majors to get their factories without spending unnecessary amounts of garrison equipment.
@@NaderBerbish more like collab governments give 100% manpower so you can steal it. Also can trade with 80 resource per civ. Lastly they give 75% factories. They're useful for someone like me who like Free Trde law too much.
As someone quite fond of complex 4X games, I've found that even as someone who wants to learn them, I tend to avoid playing the tutorial and simply throw myself into a campaign and fiddle around the menus for a while and just learn through experience. I feel something that allows you to just start engaging and bringing up tutorials as things come up and advisors to help you with choices (but never saying "PRESS THIS BUTTON DO IT") is probably how I would like to see it done
The point you made is HUGE. I play games for fun, but also to develop my second language skill (in Japanese) and that has really highlighted how cumbersome dropping so much at once really is. I had to spend 45 minutes (probably 20 if I was native in Japanese) learning about all the features of my base, most of which I am not ready to use yet.
I think factorio did a pretty good job at its tutorial with it's short campaigns trying to solve specific problems and a playable tutorial you can play anytime during your game.
The inverted pyramid at 3:48 reminded me of Factorio, since the amount of stuff you have to worry about scales with how much you've built and researched.
Civilization has always looked really scary, but it doesn't take long for you to feel comfortable and in control. Watching a few videos about different things is super helpful.
Imagine this kind of stuff applied to software like Blender, Unreal Engine, Unity, Photoshop, Zbrush, Houdini, etc. when you launch them for the first times. In how many of them you stopped learning because of overwhelming UI and bad designed in-software tutorials?
@@GaussianEntity I thought it was just me. When I finally started grasping some rudimentary coding skills, I was confused -- why is this stuff taught in such a confusing, arbitrary fashion? My trick is to treat it kind of like learning a spoken language. I write out what I want the code to do in a plain English sentence, then convert it a piece at a time until it's programmable formula.
Another thing to remember about tutorials in my opinion is that you don't need to teach the player how to play optimal, just make him get by and trust that he'll get better over time by himself ...or not, that's okay too. I played a lot of games very sub-optimal and only later found out about it, but I still had a ton of fun regardless.
For far too many "complex games," I've always just stopped playing them in the middle of the tutorial. Tutorials that always get in the way are the ones I really despise.
In the same vein of not assuming your players have played other games, you can't assume that your players have used external tools like google sheets. I still think using the same icon is a good choice (better than making up a new one), just make sure that players who haven't seen that icon before will still know where to go.
Games are really streamlined here for most part, compared to engeneer/graphical softwere, that still operates like early two thousands eurojunk. I've a dream to pass EU resolution forcing universal control scheme for everything. :D
@@antonisauren8998 that wholly depends on the genre, I'm afraid. Some genres operate on a universal control and mechanics scheme (the shooters are the posterboys for this), while others operate in their own fiefdoms (I'm looking at you RTSes, RTTs, simulators, and the like). It's the latter that is literally killing themselves because they have fandoms whose stick is basically, 'if I can't have it my way, *_THEN NO ONE WILL_* when I'm done with it!'. I mean, look what happened with Anno, 2205 was an experiment that was _absolutely needed_ at the time... but a portion of the player base would rather see it all *_BURN_* than have the series more accessible. Yet, 1800 is considered the second-best Anno game _EVER_ (second to only Anno 2070 for most of the fandom).
I found Victoria II to be the easiest of Paradox's historical grand strategy games to get into, in part because there are fairly easy to find easy countries where you can basically start out bad at everything, not really understand what any of these spreadsheets and sliders mean/do and still do OK at them. Prussia is a great easy tutorial nation, you are powerful, as you are likely to be largely land based, Eurocentric, and conservative you can ignore a lot of the game and the map, you have clear event chains telling you the path you most likely want to take through the game, and your pops are diverse enough to give you and idea of why they matter but homogeneous enough that mismanagement can usually be solved with a couple armies. And is you just go with the flow by the end of the game you likely have the feeling that you built a glorious empire, even if you likely will also be aware that you didn't do it by playing the good guys. From there you can move on to more colony based powers, then smaller more vulnerable European nations or developing nations, and finally you can install PDM and really get into it.
1 thing that really stands out in a game is when I feel like the entire game is a tutorial, when a game teaches new things for 95% of the game, it starts feeling a bit like you are never truly knolodgeable about most things, and when you come back to replay that game you know everything, but you only get to actually do everything you used to untill you actually get to that 95% of the game, wich feels lie it defeats the point of the invisible tutorial if it's done very slowly This is something I really noticed in plague tale, that game was mostly based on stealth, but I often found that I was constantly getting a new abilitie, wich I never got to use, or was extremely situational, wich when I got to the end sections of the game, I found myself feeling like I had no idea what I should do, or simply felt like the game was pushing me, wich would be fine if it had been done for more time before hand, and all the mechanics were introduced earlier yet I also can't handle extremely tedious long tutorials, for obvious reasons
I grew up playing a city building game called Pharaoh. It was set in Ancient Egypt and you had to progress through a series of campaigns, each of which has specific aims. You can't progress until you complete the aims of that campaign. Each campaign only has certain systems turned on. The first campaigns take much less time to play than later ones. In addition, you start out furthest back in the past so it makes sense that those early settlements have fewer systems and simpler goals while later large scale cities require many many complicated systems.
This video reminds me of a Steam review I once read on Crusader Kings: "I played this for about 1000 hours, and I think I've almost finished the tutorial. Can't wait for the real game" :D
@Lazy Sorcerer that's only stages 1-4, another 6 to go
I recently started playing EU4 with one of my friends who has 1000s of hours in the game, I asked him what a certain button in a certain menu did, he didn't even know that menu existed (this was before the new update that broke everything)
I had a similar experience with CKII, I tried doing the tutorial (in which I controlled the kingdom of León as Alfonso VI) but it asked me to do something that was mind-numbingling stupid, which is try to take the Canary Islands by force.
Between the distance from my kingdom, the lack of strategic usefulness of that territory and the painful first experience I had trying to attack them (between their defensive bonuses and the attrition my troops suffered from, it was a complete failure), I gave up on doing what the game told me to and instead set my eyes on much more logical objectives, like using my ruler's high Intrigue stats to make sure he inherits his dear brothers' kingdoms sooner rather than later.
Two centuries later, the Empire of Hispania is butting heads with the accursed Holy Roman Empire, still not giving a crap about the Canaries.
Thanks to the game's stupid tutorial, I made my own choices and had fun in the process.
@@MoustachioFurioso83 starting on 'noob island' (Ireland) is a great tutorial place to start
@@Spicarium I think it depends on your previous gaming experience. If you're new to games then Ireland is great. If you have some experience playing other strategy games then starting off in Ireland is likely to be extremely boring. I remember when I first played CK2 and everyone recommends Ireland so I started off in Ireland, it's basically just sitting at speed 5 until you can fabricate claims and expand with nothing else to do because you're a count with no vassals or anything. I found playing as William the Conqueror a much more interesting but still noob friendly experience.
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn” - Xun
So much wisdom in very few words, amazing.
Xún Kuàng (also known as Xúnzǐ), c. 310 - c. 235 BCE
That's why I got good at math. I couldn't memorize stuff like everyone else, so I had to understand it by playing around with it. Then I could write out formulas because I knew why they were they that way, and only had a few things to memorize.
"Spank the flank" - Sun Zthu
That can honestly applied to everything. A lot of people still fail at things simply because they are only told things and said "teachers" blame it on them for not doing it well or not at all.
Case in point me, I have ADHD and for a long people have always been "Do this, do that", " Stop being lazy", and etc. but never go hands on with me and naturally I end up not following up on such things.
Interestingly as well, I actually can learn fast and well and can perform very well and those are the time where I get involved in it. I'm a decent artist because of drawing lessons I had, I'm pretty good in certain videogames because well I play them and etc.
When it comes to the concept of tutorials, absolutely nothing is worse than when the game just tells me where to click without making sure I know why. I rarely learn what I'm supposed to, but then the game moves forward entirely assuming I understand everything perfectly now. I'm easily overwhelmed by too much information--especially visual information like numbers and symbols and menus and such--so that kind of teaching is a surefire way to confuse the heck out of me.
Ui's are a difficult thing to do. One of my least favorite things to do in general. But it's better not to have a tutorial at all. Unless you have a concept that truly needs one. Most trailers don't have overwhelming UI's too. So this could be easier.
Also, Arlo, I didn't know you were a GMTK person
nice seeing you here man.
And don't forget the overwhelmingness of the tutorials in Monster Hunter! You said it yourself in your review, but it almost turned me away from the game because it was just so much, said so little and was incredibly intrusive, even though a single UA-cam tutorial of about 10 minutes set me up for 100+ hours of fun.
No man's sky is awful at this. Bought the game on sale, but was so bored with the tutorial I never picked it up again
Arlo, response video on ideal tutorial for pikman 4?
It’s like playing mafia with ur friends. once they understand the sheriff, doctor, and mafia, you can add more roles to make a complex game more enjoyable and accessible
Isn't Mafia a GTA clone?
@@torgranael No it's among us but in real life
@@starmano34 Ah, a Werewolf clone.
@@torgranael Mafia was first actually, Andrew Plotkin changed it to Werewolves in 1997
@@torgranael werewolf's a mafia clone
I love the portal 2 tutorial
“Press A to speak”
*jumps*
Got me so good the first time
"ok...or you can jump. Ok, that's uhm...yes that's fine"
I knew it wasn't going to be like every other game just by that one single action.
Yeah I was like: "wait isn't she supposed to be a silent protag- lmao I jumped, okay game you have me"
I did not even realize that that was teaching you how to jump
that was space
@@usualunusualkid7149 On controller it was "a".
When I saw this video, my immediate thought was:
"How far in before he mentions Portal?" The answer was pretty quickly. 2:16
Considering Portal is 90% tutorial, it is basically guaranteed to appear in any video about tutorials.
The other 10% is pure comedy.
Portal remains the prime example of how to do a tutorial completely organically. It is a rare case of, IMHO, a truly perfect game.
@@Havron *truly perfect tutorial
That Portal music at 1:24 already gave me a slight nostalgia-kick
Every video I expect to see Into the Breach and Slay the Spire.
"Blindly following instructions just isn't a very effective way to learn."
This is what pisses me off about coding tutorials. They tell me what to type, but not what any of it means.
I always speculated that coding tutors who just told you what to type didn't truly know how it worked and were actually just copy-pasting and tweaking behind the scenes. But to be fair, I haven't stumbled upon that many since there's so many better tutorials out there that actually show you how stuff works. When you first learn to code you mostly need to learn basic syntax for the programming language and how to debug and test your code. And some background info on lower level languages can also drastically increase your understanding after that. But once you got that down and need to learn libraries, tutorials that just show example code can give you a lot of clues about how the libraries work.
I feel that way about most game design software I've used in school. I can make pretty neat things in Unreal Engine, but it's only because I'm copying and pasting blueprints from older projects. With a blank editor I'm totally lost.
That's why I always mess around with code a bit to see what happens to understan what it does.
I wish I could like this twice
There's a book that I have that actually tells you why a certain part of code works, in an interesting way too.
The only problem is that it was outdated before I was born cause it focuses on code from the mid and early 90s.
I love the suggested idea of rethinking game modes to "from simple to complex" as opposed to "from easy to hard". (maybe combine both)
I know people who might feel insecure about selecting 'easy' difficulty (moreso when they already play games regularly) when trying out complex games or new genres and it results in them being unable to learn at their own pace at higher difficulties and dropping the new game altogether
That would be a welcome change so I could play some of my favorite games with my friends after they properly learn without feeling like I'm dragging them around
a video about tutorials, he wasent going for likes when he came up with one!
Some things I really dislike in tutorials is when they show me everything but restricts my movement, sometimes it removes the context for me, the other one is the pacing of the tutorial, when it's so slow that I get bored out of my mind.
I get that, because how does it make sense to NOT let the player experiment with the mechanics you're teaching them in the beginning, it's what they'll end up doing and part of what will have them understand in the end, so why restrict them?
If you want a player to learn how to jump you shouldn't lock them in place until they hit the button. You should make sure the path is elevated so you can still run around but if you want to continue you'll have to jump. I believe the same applies to most game mechanics
@@mekannatarry1929 most games do this:
*Has a very long tutorial, split into 16 parts, each of them telling what a button does, but when its teaching you about the population panel, all other buttons disappear. You get the idea.*
"Have fun memorizing every button, where they are, and what they do."
Seriously though. I learn like this: "hmm, the strange button next to the rabbit button is food. Got it." Not like this: "hmm, the tutorial is over. I remember exactly what it said and what everything does. I have superhuman memory afterall."
@@rickvanleeuwen9589 pretty much this. It ties in to teaching the play WHY to do an action rather than just how.
Speed is what kills it for me about 70% of the time...the other 30% is loss of control. The only time loss of control doesn't bother me is when they integrate the tutorial into a dream/story/experience sequence where it's more like a quick time event thing where a lot of your time is spent focusing on the story unfolding and you interact with it a little. That also tends to help with pacing a ton.
Many games really need to implement speed/difficulty options in their tutorials (Don't play many games? Click here....game every day? Click here...etc) I want to quit a game and play something else when I have to go through a 20 minute tutorial where my agency is practically nothing and I have to have some narrator tell me super basic things for half of it that could be said in about 30 seconds.
It would be great if games also had a 'welcome back' tutorial. We've all came back to a game having no clue where we are, what we are supposed to do, or how the controls work.
I feel like Space Engineers does, except it's always on.
Every couple of minutes it'll pop up a box reminding you how to do something basic, like move, fly, or refill your hydrogen. Useful if you've forgotten how to play. Little bothersome if you've been playing it a few days and would rather it work up to something more advanced and useful.
Yes, this, so much this. And also a way to leave yourself notes. I tried getting back to a CK 3 campaign after months, and was like: who's that, what was I doing, who are my friends, who are my enemies, aaaah, I don't remember anything I was doing when I quit the game last time.
This is my issue too. Loads of games I had to take a long break for and then came back and realized I'm unable to play it because I forgot the controls, plot and so on and have no way to revisit it without restarting the game.
I feel like that would ruin a lot of games for people
This is exactly why I have so many half finished games. I can't believe they don't all have this as an option.
As someone who loves complex games, I agree that their tutorials are often an absolute chore. So much so, that most of the time I don't even bother with them - I just watch a bit of a let's play of the game, see how the game works and the thought process of someone experienced, and then I jump straight into the normal game. If there's anything I don't know after that, I usually either try to figure it out on my own or look it up in a wiki/forum.
I think part of the problem is that these games attract players that share your mindset - they learn how stuff works by just fucking around with it. However, these games definitely lose many other types of players because they're not used to teaching them
Yeah, that's how I do it but a solid tutorial could work wonders. I for one thought that the CK3 tutorial was pretty decent tho.
Yah I remember playing civ6 and got tired of the tutorial because it felt so linear. When the game actually started I didn’t know what to do so I built up my army as quickly as possible and attacked one of my neighbors who turned out to be the strongest civilization on the map. When I declared war I had just unlocked a catapult when the war ended I had finish building my first catapult and had lost my entire army. The game never taught me how to not fall behind and how to manage my resources. Every civilization around me was so ahead that when I had canons they had planes when I had planes they had apcs and when I had apcs they had death robots. The only reason I didn’t lose was because I stayed isolated and allied with some strong allies by giving them resources. Which then made me poor and lead to revolt which made me make more troops to fight them and just spend all my time trying to not lose. Every new city I would build would always fall way behind and I wouldn’t know why. While all my neighbors had 8 city’s that were all doing amazing I only had 3 which 2 of where useless. Another country eventually declared war and killed all my units that I had belt up for 70 rounds with one 1 apc.
@@optionalbread42 ok... This has to be the funniest re-enactment of a real world country falling behind in technology and money in general
Yeah but the problem with this is you had to look outside of the game in the first place to learn how to play the game itself. Games should teach you how to play them rather than going to someone else who's played 5000 hours and then following up with wiki homework. There's a reason why people find it so hard to get into grand strategy games like these.
Something interesting I was waiting to see pop up was learning styles such as "visual" "aural" "kinesthetic" and so on. It was a big part of a research project I did for making digital anatomical models for uni students and early on in development I was always trying to cater to learning styles. That is until my supervisor pointed me towards some learning theory and pedagogical studies that indicated that the way we learn best isn't dictated by some magical style. It turns out learning style theory is quite baseless (it was initially just an observer's guestimate of how children responded to different objects in a classroom), but we prefer learning through the medium which communicates the information most effectively. Taking this perspective to my project led me to ask questions of "how is the information best conveyed" rather than "how would 'x' learner student respond to this". So sometimes a visual aide is just intrinsically *better* than text, and conversely a quick splash of text can do much better than a busy visual!
I’m so glad we moved away from that kind of style. I’m a former secondary school/college (the British sense of the word, ergo not university) teacher.
My teaching degree (PGCE) was completed just over a decade ago and the tutors were OBSESSED with visual, aural, kinaesthetic, etc. and I found it to be such…well, it was kind of bollocks. I had to accept it as that was the pedagogical wisdom at the time but it was only a couple of years after I finished that, a friend of mine did their teaching degree. However, they mentioned that the syllabus made very little reference to those learning styles during their experience.
wanted to point out that learning styles are... mostly baseless.
Thank you for saving me that block of text ^^
There's a Veritasium video about this: Where he asks people to memorise some pictures on some cards, but the people who remembered the most weren't so-called "Visual learners". Instead, they were people who employed memory techniques.
and what did you found ?
To be honest i prefer when games show not tell as in by level design or being really subtle such as the one for Super Metroid like how you are taught how to wall jump for the first time you mimic bird creatures that are in the back ground. And in A Link to the Past there is literally no tutorial and if you need any hints look around you as it is literally built into the level design of the game itself unless you are doing things out of order which you can after the first dungeon but point is i believe a great game teaches you as you play but is not letting you know that it is teaching you.
Its what makes old games actually fun compared to games these days especially RPGs (Looking at you Xenoblade chronicles 3 I DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING FORCED TUTORIALS). Like even if i never played a fucking RPG in my life i don't want a Tutorial being forced down my fucking throat especially one that pretty much is 3 hours long like I DON'T GOVE A FUCK LET ME FUCKING SKIP THESE FUCKING THINGS. Yeah Tutorials in RPGs are fucking long if you can't skip them, its like "WHAT AM I PLAYING YUGIOH?" i am not going to read the fucking invasive useless text and forced combat especially since i am not going to fucking remember it anyway as i am UNFUCKINGINTERESTED in anything a fucking tutorial has to say unless i search for it myself
Like sure i get wanting new players not missing out on how the controls work but GIVE A FUCKING OPTION TO SKIP THEM
You fool, you just gave Paradox a reason to turn everything into a DLC
They'll release a dlc for unlocking the lifestyle perks and another one for the CASUS BELLI option and people will still buy it
New EA games rising?
they already have a reason
Noooooooooo
Jokes on you ima mod it for FREE!
@@DiselSun not even close
Thanks so much for the Mini Metro shout out! It was an interesting design exercise in trying to blend the game's minimalist UI with rolling out info to the player at a gentle pace and we are so lucky that it ended up working out so harmoniously. Great video as always!
Thanks!
"gentle pace" Is your game intended for children?
@@jetstreak2786 haha you played it? Things get hectic quickly
@@jetstreak2786 Since when is the word gentle exclusively associated with children
Will your new game be available on Linux, too?
Fyi, the set of all Real Games is contained within the set of all Complex Games.
Yes yes and more yes my brain is blown
Which can then be subdivided into the sets of Natural Games, Whole Games, and Integer Games.
@@crimsoncyclone You can bring them together to get a countable amount of rational games
@@tommo7802 And for any real game you can even find an infinite sequence of rational games converging to it which thankfully means you don't have to play uncountably many games to experience them all, you've just got to play all the rational ones
People complain so much about Linear Games, but once you understand determinants it gets a lot easier
I actually sometimes have a problem with drip-fed tutorials, and it's when a game has times where you _could_ make use of a mechanic if you had access to it, but your options and opportunities are limited artificially because the game hasn't given you the tutorial for it yet. Persona 5 Strikers is a good example of a game that falls victim to this at the very beginning, because you start the first _real_ level without the ability to use cover points or ambushes, instead relying on manually placing yourself outside of an enemy's line of sight and waiting until they turn around before quickly running into them from behind to get a back attack. This makes the beginning of the game _way_ harder until you're finally given the ability to use cover points, at which point that same intimidating opening room becomes a cakewalk. Maybe this is intended in that game's case.
An even better example is the combat systems that Tales of Berseria insists on dripfeeding you throughout the entire game, making the combat linear, boring, and restrictive until the game finally deigns to give you its actual depth piece by piece after certain boss fights. It can be frustrating not having the option to just turn those tutorials off or tell it to give them to you all at once at the beginning so you can fully experience the _entire_ game rather than being effectively gimped until the last third. I actually have an oddly similar problem with games that lock cosmetics behind story progression (for example, modern Pokémon games): by the time you can actually make your character look the way you want them to look, all the cutscenes that would really emphasize those looks have already been and gone.
I have this problem with Magicka.
I get stuck in a level and can't go up. What would help me a lot was a speels that'd be unblocked later.
I could unblock speels on multiplayer, except that my sister always get the speels before me.
I feel you, it's particularly irritating in a new game plus when you've got to wait to use key game-play elements until you've reached a certain point in the story and watched the bloody tutorial.
@@charlespentrose7834 the biggest offender I've played recently is Fallen Order. They even added an NG+, but all you keep is cosmetics and such, no powers. Not even the points you spent on powers previously.
Yeah a drip fed tutorial approach can work well if the mechanics allow it, but the truth of it is that's just not always the case due to most games not really being designed to be compelling when many of the features are yet to be added.
I wonder how a game directed by Mark Brown could be like
Epic
"in-tresting"
Perfect
Probably not that good otherwise he would already be making games.
Critics and artists usually are not the same thing. I dont know if this applies also here
One thing that Ghost of Tsushima did that I really appreciated was that every time you picked up a tried some new lethal ghost tool, you would get a cutscene that explains why such a tool is dishonorable, followed by Jin apologizing to his uncle for feeling that he needs to do so to defeat the mongols.
There's a lot of emphasis in games on tutorials explaining mechanics, but I believe there to to a lot of room to explore with games that attempt to explain both the lore of the world and the rules of the world at the same time.
Gonna play this on my birthday in 2 weeks. Can't wait.
Same as EVE Online
But can you still use it?
@@gettingshotsomeonesgonnapa8635 yea
Yet there aren't major consequences for using them (beside explaining why the ending happens...). You are considerate "Dishonored" even if you never use them after the tutorial; ore you can exploit them without consequences. Love the game, but was kind of let down by this.
One thing a lot of games do that really helps with the learning curve is having “simple” and “advanced” configurations that change how much granular control you have over the system. So when I started playing Civ V I would just let each city automatically assign resources to production, food, science, etc., but as I understood the game better I could tell each city what to focus on, and as I understood even better I could assign each citizen to specific slots to get the precise balance I wanted.
Following that, you also need to have the ability for old players to not be dragged down by the tutorial, In the Civ V example it's good and all that the complex tools got re-added eventually, but that probably pushed off some veteran players. Along with that you got games like Pokemon. All in all, their tutorials are pretty good for first-time players, however many people who've played since rby or even those just doing a repeat playthrough really suffer through the 2 hours of talk to the professor, get the pokemon, pokeball tutorial, learn how pokecenters work, "hi im your rival," look at the box legendary, here's the first gym, you need this kind of pokemon to beat the gym leader, so on.
Pokemon has a little more issues than that, the tutorials aren't even that good for first time players. They stop at the very basics, and tend to leave out big parts of the battle system, or only mention them in vague terms such as "if you use a super effective attack/use an attack of the same type of your pokemon/have an attack boost, you will do more damage". But such vague statements don't actually help you to decide if, against a certain opponent, you should use a STAB attack that isn't super effective or should use a non-STAB super effective attack, for instance. They give you the actual numbers in math class in scarlet/violet, but I think it is the first time the info was actually easy to find in the game.
Of course, it's not information that you need right away, but not giving it at all does the game a disservice. In truth, that kind of information is completely unnecessary, because in a lot of cases, you can go really far in the game, and even win it, without understanding much about the combat system. But that's also a bad thing. Sure, young kids won't mind and will be very happy to crush champion after champion with overleveled pokemons, but older newcomers to the series will quickly realise that any attempt to actually learn the subtleties of the system are useless, and because they don't need to put it to practice, it's much harder to remember. So they end up being dissatisfied of the simplicity of the battle system that they experience, knowing it could be better than that, but unable to grasp the most complex mechanism because the game isn't interested in teaching them all that much in game.
Putting all the basic info in extremely detailed and unskippable form in the beginning, and then barely anything sprinkled among random NPCs for the rest of the game is really not ideal, for anyone. It's probably not easy to accommodate such a large and diverse audience, and they have been trying some stuff, but so far, it isn't particularly effective.
Today I realized that the filter icon was depicting a funnel this whole time.
a filter funnel to be specific, like what you use to make fancy coffee
what did you and these 50 likes think it was?
@@_narrows I couldn't place the image, but that isn't peculiar to me. Does the 9 dots that represents a menu indicate anything in particular to you? If you didn't know what a Floppy Disk was, and saw the save icon all your life in digital media (say you are 15 years old) would you presume that the icon depicts something in particular?
Not accusing you or anything, but you could consider the filter depicting a funnel, in my case, an instance of perceived largely arbitrary icon crafting/selection. You could liken this to Playstation's X O Square Triangle, where the symbols apparently lack any innate meaning, but were purportedly designed to have particular universal application that I personally wouldn't call intuitive.
@@TPandaManT I appreciate this quality response. Yeah that makes sense; personally I remember making the connection seeing my grandpa using a funnel while working on a car as a kid, so I suppose never experiencing something similar isn't unlikely.
If we're thinking of the same thing, I've always interpreted the nine dots/squares as an array of button or icons, which I believe was intuitive. The Playstation buttons on the other hand, I agree. I've never viewed their intended meaning as anything more than trivia, due to the unintuitiveness.
I always thought it was a vacuum cleaner.
Great video.
I might add a warning to, never make the "Driver tutorial" mistake.
Never make your tutorial so hard to do, that the game is completely unplayable.
Oh yeah, I think I remember that. It put you on a giant parking floor inside a building and taught you to do different maneuvers, but at the end gave you a hard requirement to do a lot of hard to pull off maneuvers all within a time limit (like a few minutes or so).
Back in highschool someone had sneaked that game into schools computers and many school breaks were spent taking turns trying to beat that tutorial.
Or if you do, have the mercy to add an option to skip a tutorial and return to it later
Had this exact same problem in the Jet Set Radio tutorial.
@@mattdavisgames A lot of different games have this problem, most notably Rivals of Aether (it force-teaches you how to do shit like Reverse Aerial Rushes which are literally impossible when playing on a keyboard. Mercifully these tutorials can be skipped, though you miss out on unlocking the Tutorial Grid X, THE BEST GODDAMN STAGE IN THE GAME) and the character combo tutorials or whatever they're called in Street Fighter 4
@@ZesTofthelemon I was 100% convinced that was gonna be a skill issue but nope there is actually a bug on keyboards in rivals
small QoL suggestion: keep the game titles on screen the whole time. I often get absorbed watching the game then have to skip back because I want to know what it was (I don't play many games).
I’ve been playing Splatoon 3 recently and I love the way they use the story mode campaign as a tutorial. Splatoon may not be a city builder, but it is a team pvp game, which means you’ll inevitably lose over and over again during the process of learning the game, and that can be frustrating. By having a single player campaign with levels that focus on a single mechanic at a time, almost treating it like a puzzle game, players are slowly but surely introduced to and made familiar with the many, many mechanics the game contains, all while being led along by the promise of story progression.
Love your videos Mark. My team and I are working on our first video game which will be historical strategy, so this video is extremely useful for us! :)
How far along are you? I might play that
@@KarmasAB123 Nowhere near launch yet. Released within the year or very early next year. However we do have a discord for the prototype of the game on tabletop, but the rules and rulebook are being overhauled.
@@buddermonger2000 cool
@@buddermonger2000 Anywhere I can go to track it? Love strategy games and I find Dev's first foray into it usually come with a lot of interesting changed and ideas,
As a game dev student, we often get recommended gamemakers toolkit videos, I'm sure this video will be included in next years recommendations
The Crusader Kings example is interesting, because I can't imagine any of these techniques fitting it - other than, maybe, historical knowledge.
For me, youtube letsplays and tutorials helped me get into the game, showed me how to read the game and see the data I'm interested in
Introducing UI elements slowly would make it a lot better for new players, when you start the tutorial campaign having all ui elements hidden other than the one currently being explained and the ones previously introduced would go a long way to avoid overwhelming people
Thats the problem, the game wasn't made with the tutorial in mind.
They created the game with a lot of complex features and only added a tutorial after that.
What this video is saying, is that it's worth thinking about the tutorial while making the base game.
@@multiapokalipsa In that case, the answer is easy -- sponsor some youtubers to make some short lets plays and tutorials
In games like that you just need one fairly easy starting nation that players can bumble through following events and feel like they are progressing even if they don't understand all the mechanics. I never played CK much so I don't know if it has something like this but in Vicky II there was Prussia, and easy nation that was both powerful and limited in ways that made it easy to succeed at even if you had little idea about how the mechanics worked and you just followed the quest chain and tried to fix problems as they come up.
The "click here, yes, yes, now click there" kind of tutorials are bad and ineffective for exactly the same reason that "do this symbol manipulation, yes yes, now write this other symbol" is a terrible way to teach maths.
Sincerely, a maths educator.
This. I hate when the game tutorial is "click here, click there" when I can click ONLY on those spots. After this type of tutorial I often blank out.
Please game devs, tell me WHY this is a good move and WHY those other moves are bad and then let me do them anyway.
its a tutorial for a different game, i.e. wack-a-mole
Strategy games are mostly clicking.
Should they say don't click?
Total war and civ games have pretty good tutorials.
They don't just say click,they say click here if u wanna do this.
@@hieroprotoganist3440 It's how you present it.
Explaining the *what* isn't as important as explaining the *why.* Telling a player "Put X at Y" isn't doing anything useful for later on. "Put X at Y, here's why" is better, but still doesn't really explain much. "You need Z, which can be gotten with X [highlight X]. A good place to put X is at Y, because A." is much better.
Instead of saying "Build a storage building here", a much better way to put it is "You'll need more resource capacity to build that temple you're trying to make, the storage building can be used to increase your capacity. It's a good idea to place storage buildings near where resources are gathered so that your workers don't waste as much time walking back and forth." You explain what they need to do, why and when they need to do it, how to do it, the best way to do it, and _why_ that's the best way to do it. Saying "Do X" only tells them what to do. It doesn't tell them when they should do that action again, or why they did it, or how it helps them.
@@dusklunistheumbreon This is literally how total war tutorials are and civ 5 and 6 .
I 100% agree with the intuitive suggestion. I hate reading through text walls, so I'll often skip tutorials and fumble around trying to figure it out. It's how I learned AOE, Civ and Total War. I've missed some important mechanics in all of those, but it was a whole lot more engaging and I don't regret it!
forget about the in game tutorial, it was useless.
Always Watch a beginner guide on UA-cam and read tips on Reddit.
it's easier to watch a demonstration video, and supplement your game knowledge with Tips from other player.
never play the game head on without informing yourself first
it will let you get up to speed 200x faster than having to follow the tutorial without any context.
basically you'll be able to get 60% of the game mechanic by watching a single 20 Minute video. which is crazy fast.
Zero Frustration, zero stress.
Every teacher should watch this, not just designers.
They assumed we can remember things we learned YEARS ago
@@an2939 this one music teacher gave us an hour and a half talk about how we "wont be able to achieve anything in life" after we told her we didn't remember the timing of each musical note, that was great
@@bojdrak how pleasant of them. 🙄
@@julianemery718 At least they were statistically realistic if that's a plus...
As a professor who studies this type of thing, you are 100% right. Not only that, I think the two fields of education research and game design have a LOT we can learn from one another to improve both fields, maybe drastically imho.
Dwarf Fortress has a pretty interesting take on how to do a tutorial.
There is no tutorial. Time to suffer.
I'd rather have no tutorial and read a well organised wiki (at my own pace) than having to slog through a shitty tutorial :/
@@drGeppo Very fair.
Dwarf Fortress leans really heavily on the real-world interactions thing Mark brings up. I've watched some streamers play it, and their plan / execution narration makes it sounds REALLY intuitive.... once you understand how the basic interface works, that is.
@@GameDevYal Oh, absolutely. It's just that, with so many possible instructions, any interface is going to look like a mess. And the graphics certainly don't help to make anything easy to recognise to newcomers.
I love how DF's help screen literally is 2-3 sentences telling you to look up stuff on the wiki. And to be fair, with a game of this complexity that's the only right thing to do. Not only because it would take an insane effort to somehow put this content into the game and keep it up to date, but also a wiki is great at letting people do stuff in their own tempo. Don't want to learn about wells for now because you've got a miasma problem? That's fine (and FUN)
In my job I teach python to a subset of the scientific community, the reason I mention this is that many of your videos echo with me and help me in my job. Everything from accessibility and keeping players (students) engaged translates really well to online tech teaching. This is awesome content, thanks for sharing it.
Awesome, you must be a great teacher :)
I like how you referred to older segment of the video to keep viewers engaged, 6:29 to 7:19
Interesting thing: we were having a conversation about a certain type of player at _Dungeons & Dragons_ tables: the player that never learns the game. And I think the "investment vs. willingness to learn" is really key to this. I might try to do this more often with new players.
9:00 the stripped down version for easier settings reminds me of the way difficulty worked in Perfect Dark. Harder settings have more objectives and expect more from you.
Goldeneye did this before PD, but PD was just a straight up improvement.
Also thief where objectives, required loot and permission to kill depends on difficulty
18:40 Funnily enough, Minecraft greatly benefitted from the fact that it was virtually unlearnable without Google/UA-cam, as that forced people to build a community to help each other out and thereby market the game to a greater audience.
It may have never seen the level of success it is known for today if it included a proper tutorial or a built-in wiki.
Thank god they've been adding more and more features to make it easier for new players though
Honestly I'd argue it's the other way around. Because it's the sort of building game where people want to show off what they've made, a community was encouraged to be built which in turn made people googling for stuff not a problem.
In particular, the game got somewhat popular before survival mode was created, so there wasn't anything to learn to keep people out, it was just building cool stuff, and then by the time there was stuff to be learning the community was pretty much already there.
Also minecraft has the plus of you not having any preset goals. If you'd need to Google in the mid of a raging battle, that'd be bad, but my first minecraft world was creative to learn the controls etc.
@@jan-lukas "If you'd need to Google in the mid of a raging battle" - You have no idea how tense the battles in Minecraft Beta were. But you're right, I never had to google anything during them. :)
@@kibo7838 this, basically. it was already popular before survival, and even after, survival was basic enough at the start that you could intuit most of the crafting recipes. and then they slowly added more complexity, not unlike what GMTK mentioned with adding more mechanics over time
I remember when I started playing cities Skylines. And I had a traffic jam that I could not fix, nothing worked. So I went to the internet and found that there was whole community of players researching how to fix it. There was a huge wiki on roads and jams, and different practical and theoretical solutions.
I went and tried a couple and then ran out of money, had a lot of fun though.
"just one more lane i promise it'll fix the traffic"
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri exactly implements one of your suggestions. On the lowest difficulties it removes some of the mechanics, and adds them back in on higher difficulties.
The original Theme Park did exactly the same. In Sandbox mode it just involved placing shops and rides and making a profit. On the 'hardest' difficulty you had to buy stock for said shops, manage employee union negotiations and deal in your own shares and shorting competitors.
@@bohemiandude That's pretty cool, like if you just want to relax and build something for fun you can take those more involved elements off and there you go.
Hmm, I only played Alpha Centauri on Citizen, maybe one higher when I felt spicy, but I do remember going through the menus and finding windows with no idea what they did, like the politics menu; all I ever knew what to do in there was get the Gaia symbol in the green for the chance to recruit mindworms.
I also remember my Terraformers could build an "airbase" but directly telling them to do it, never resulted in anything being built, nor an error. Is that something for higher levels, or just the expansion.
And now I remember one of the higher difficulty mechanics was Prototype units, right? +50% stats for being the first unit of its make on Planet? All this reminiscing kind of makes me want to pop it back in again. Locusts of Chiron, all the way.
I love how game design and teaching are so closely related.
I subbed and saved this video because i found the tips applicable to teaching in my IT related job as well
"Playtest your tutorials"
Nintendo does this. A leak of unused levels in NSMBU Deluxe has a ton of unused early versions of 1-1. The only other level that has as many unused versions is _Walking Piranha Plants!_ for some reason.
I've also seen the advice to design the first level in the game last. Because at that point you know much better what's important in the later stages and are a better level designer for that game than at the start of the project.
Project Winter teaches in a manner similar to what you mentioned at around 7:40.
They have a "Basic" mode that is the actual game, just stripped of the more complex parts. It's the exact same game, just simplified to help beginners understand the core mechanics before they start worrying about the differences between less important game features.
Speaking as a beginner to that game, I found it INCREDIBLY useful, and it's the only reason I didn't quit that game from being too overwhelmed at the start.
"Tutorials are pretty good these days"
*shows a 13 year old game*
Damn, time do be flying by doe.
00:43 Half life 2, 2004.
Wait, WHEN?? Really?
@@leovk5779 No, no, no... Half-Life 2 is *17* years old. Ol' Mustard was talkin' about somethin' else.
@@leovk5779 I believe he’s referring to Fallout 3. Awesome game btw 👍
@@garretthelvy1685 fallout 3s tutorial sucks shit though lmao
@@Muffinmurdurer reasonable minds may differ. It was definitely slow paced but I at least thought it gave a good sense of the world and role playing mechanics
Breaking up the learning into multiple short runs going for easy achievements was the best way I found for me to learn EU4. It did require some research to decide which challenges to set for myself and how to approach them, but it made conquering learning the brunt of the game more manageable and measurable
whats eu4? all i could think of was "engine unreal 4"
@@steviesteveo1 link me. I got super lost last time
@@the4thsteve27 Europa Universalis 4. As someone with over 3,500 hours in the game and all the DLC, please don't play it. You'll either get a gimped and downright unplayable experience trying to play without the DLC's or you spend $300 on what's effectively a shiny new button to click with no meaningful difference added to the game other than to stack ever escalating bonuses or fix the lead dev's butthurt every time he's beaten in a dev clash because they balance a majority single-player game around what 4% of the player base thinks is meta.
I think one of my favourite tutorials are the plains levels from Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove. Short and sweet levels that teach you not just the movement but how levels work and the structure of the games plays out.
Bruh
During a replay, I realized just how incredible the plains levels are.
On the second-to-last screen of King Knight's first level, there's a set of stairs with bugs atop them and a piece of gold in the wall above, along with a pit immediately to it's right with a trail of gold over it. The platform is just wide enough to be difficult to drop down on without taking damage, and you definitely want gold, so you dash into the wall, throwing you into a spin that allows you to kill that first bug. Going with the flow, you land on the next bug, showing that you're encouraged to link attacks, and through the previous screen displaying your dash returning upon hitting an enemy (which was poorly tutorialized, unfortunately), you are then encouraged to dash over the pit.
With a small amoung of geometry, two bugs, and 4 pieces of gold, it naturally taught you the general flow of the rest of the game; dash into terrain to pogo on enemies and keep moving forward through the air.This all happens with three button presses (jump, dash, dash) and moving to the right. It taught you to get into a flow, to link attacks and platforming in a fluid fashion. It's frankly astounding how many parts of that game are set up for exactly these kinds of things.
This is honestly why I usually only pick up these kinds of games if my friends are into them. Games like this are easier taught by a friend, especially in games like EU4 that have mechanics that will only slightly hamper you if you ignore them in the early years, so that way you can learn the fun bits early and get a feel for stuff like development, buildings, and estates later as you play and explore.
Yeah. Dwarf Fortress is normally a nightmare to learn, but with my dad, a longtime player, over my shoulder for the first few hours, I was able to pick up the basics easily enough and figure out more complex systems slowly, at my own pace, with both the wiki, in-game resources, and just expirimentation.
AoE 2's campaign imo is a near-perfect strategy tutorial. You literally start off with a single unit that can really just move and then you slowly are introduced to more and more aspects of the game. It's crazy, AoE2 managed to teach me when I was at the age of like 5 to play the game while most other games were way too complex for me.
I think something that AoE2's tutorial campaign does really well is keeping you invested. The hammy, jovial voice-acting and vivid illustrations of sufferin' Scots makes you care about working with the narrator and seeing this through to the end. "Of course, Mr. Scottish Narrator Man, I'll build five villagers. Anything for you and William Wallace!"
I think that's something that other RTSes really struggle with in their tutorials. StarCraft 1 throws you into a "tech demo" for terran tech and WarCraft 3 puts you in control of orc chieftain Thrall as he wakes up from a prophetic dream. It's some nice in-universe flavoring, sure, and both those campaigns eventually become quite compelling in their own ways. But it's all rather esoteric compared to something as grounded and shockingly compelling as AoE2 telling you "here's some struggling Scots, it's your job to command and save them."
@@cromanticheer Thrall was more relatable than AoE2 tutorial, sorry. And I hate orcs. I quit the AoE tutorial and just played Skirmish, since I already was well versed in RTS.
19:03 "I have the attention span of a six-year-old child"
- Man 20 minutes into a deep-dive on what makes a good tutorial
I mean, some six-year-olds do that.
That started said tutorial basically stating he gets bored if the game is not jingling keys in his face
@@OhNoTheFace I'd rather have jingling keys than 20 pages of text.
@@Puremindgames Yeah that is a lot of people nowadays
@@OhNoTheFace I don't know anything about that, but I just learn better through kinaesthetic learning, it's why Science was my favourite and best subject at school, and why I'm surprised I even got a GCSE in English or Religious Edication(especially RE since I answered like 3 Questions one of them being my Name, I guess to get U I'd have had to not answer anything).
Give me the keys and talk me through it, don't throw the 500 page manual at me and expect to remember anything by the time I reach the end, because chances are I'm turning the game off and playing something more fun, like FFII.
Another game that I think makes for an interesting case in terms of its tutorial is Darkest Dungeon. Not only that its initial learning curve is well-balanced by making players get used to the game's control scheme and mechanics through a short and simple quest (as Mark said, kinaesthetic learning), but it also slowly unlocks more and more facilities, so you don't get overwhelmed by having to manage your money, stress, and hero level.
Agreed, even though in DD some of the most important strategy principles are basically left unexplained
I think another "Tutorial" thats mentionable is the original mario game its very simple but also understandable
@@riccardodepieri4582 Indeed, I was quite confused myself in the beginning with certain mechanics, for instance, with positioning my heroes.
@@WEE9 Super Mario Bros.'s tutorial is practically invisible because of how well it's implemented as a level.
@@NitrogenDev Yeah thats the genius behind it its quite smart
Also, do not restrict access from menu options (like music/sound controls) until the end of the tutorial, especially if your tutorial spans multiple levels
An idea for making an "easy mode" by removing some systems from the experience: if your game has some AI built in, give the player an (AI) assistant that handles some tasks. This can be integrated into the story: a king has advisers who in easy mode are trusted with decision-making, etc. If your AI can do this, you don't have to plan difficulty levels from the get-go.
I find that in many of my favourite games, knowledge of the complex systems is not needed for lower-level play, but becomes all but required for higher difficulties. This means the full experience is never outright denied to the player, but they can avail themselves of it at their discretion. I remember someone from Platinum describing the medium difficulty of one of their games as a long tutorial so that the game can be replayed on higher difficulties, probably as NG+.
An alternative could be to give players high-level choices. For example, there could be 2 or 3 main ways to manage your army, and you could prompt the player to choose one of them and then the AI would kick in. Bonus points if the game explains why the AI is doing (or not doing) these actions in relation to the strategy you asked them to perform.
If I recall correctly, hearts of iron 3 had an AI option for almost every system in the game, so you could manually control what you wanted, and let an AI control the parts you didn't want to worry about.
@@saldor0108 And in a grand strategy game that is kind of how I prefer it to be. If the AI is at least semi competent, then I as the spirit of the nation or whatever don't want to be controlling every division by hand since I have bigger fish to fry.
there's a 4x called Distant Worlds that did this (with the IA being able to take over military, exploration, development...), but I haven't played it
GMTK: You can use your historical knowledge when playing Civilization
Me: *Having PTSD when Gandhi nuke my capital city*
India doesn't need atom bomb. We have Item Bomb
Me: builds the Eiffel tower, the Ruhr valley and the Golden gate Bridge in an inca city, to perfectly recreate the Inca taking over the world
Ah yes, the "0 value interpreted as maximum bug" that became Civ's inside joke and urban legend.
@@lolitaras22 -1 being interpreted as 255
@@bravomike4734 Close enough, I don't feel ashamed, the informational core was intact :))
“Well paced” while showing footage of Fallout 3’s opening vault sequence.
I had the same thought
fallout 3 intro is exactly how to overcomplicate and overextend a tutorial for a simple game
Hah, I had the same thought!
I think hbomberguy said it best, paraphrasing: "The answer to the question 'Where should our story begin?' being 'At our main character's birth' is the joke answer to that question"
Fallout 3's tutorial is good in the sense that it probably gets the mechanics of the game across to many people.
It just takes, what, an hour to do so (from memory)? It's insanely tedious.
Fallout 3 opening is perfect, I didn't even realize it was a tutorial.
@@dexcuracy Better than 4. "Where should our story begin?" "I don't know. Like 200 years before the action?"
Honestly, I absolutely looove figuring games out by myself. A tutorial is good for giving me the basics but finding out other stuff by myself is something I enjoy a lot, even when I eventually have to look up a specific guide or learn it from someone else. Quite love doing that
That's just a tutorial but not in-game.
Bad tutorials are just like school. You learn how to remember things that you don't need to know/don't understand enough to use
Basically, schools are just bad tutorials for higher education and life.
This got me thinking about how life coukd be if we sprinkled having to go to school throughout life instead of smooshing it in our lives immediately and for a long time.
@@Srcsqwrn
A brilliant idea. I wonder how this can be implemented.
Something similar to homeschool?
@@jasonfurumetarualkemisto5917 probably something like having work study programs periodically while in school to see real work applications for things you have been learning in class that adults are using daily.
You wouldn't have to scatter it if you can make learning fun and intuitive on its own. It may look impossible but I assure you that it can be done
Dude, this is amazing. As a user researcher in the gaming industry, I was watching your video with happy tears in my eyes. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. I watched it 2 times in a row. Will share it 'everywhere', and will watch it at least few more times. The best bulk of FTUE and UX tips and tricks so far!!!
Thanks for this comment Stefan!
"Ultimately, if someone gets stuck, you don't want their only solution to be Google."
Warframe devs in shambles lmao
But instead they did (or let players do) something really interesting. Basically, the game lives because of the community. By making the chat the only thing accessible to everyone to gather informations, trade, befriend, etc. and creating a shitload of possibilities for everything, they made the players involved and wanting to know more, to try more, to get more. Call it lazy (and at this point, I'm sure they'd deserve it more than a bit :p ) but I find it very interesting.
Tf2's potted plant is sweating
@@HigaaraEnd I don't know if having a chat feature and relying on people should be called interesting. I sure as hell stopped playing because of how poorly the game explains everything.
@@Jonkiller10 it is true that it is not a good thing for most of the audience but it makes a certain niche of players stick around. And if Warframe isn't a perfect example of a niche game, idk what is
Also pretty much any MMORPG ever
One of my favorite things about Civ 6 is that the tutorial is really basic but you are encouraged to explore the various mechanics through eurekas, inspirations, and city state quests. The world is wide open and these things give you something to focus on while you learn the ropes. As you increase in difficulty, you need to focus your attention but you wouldn't know what to focus on without trying out the various mechanics.
For CK3, I found that playing for just a single life time as an OP character and then a regular character of each build type really helped me learn the intricacies of how certain mechanics work, as well as what skills were more or less important for certain goals I might want to accomplish. I feel like a short 1 lifetime mode with premade builds might really help people just starting out.
Interesting idea
Yeah, it's much easier to get the hang of CK 2&3 with the simple "fuck around and find out" sandbox method.
Same for me, a good character prevents helps offset dumb mistakes from a lack of knowledge but giving you stronger overall buffs.
And this offsets frustration letting me Learn easier what's happening.
Teaching method aside, if someone doesn't have the patience to sit through the tutorial, they will definitely not have the patience to play it. I doubt GMTK would like to sit there for 1 hour so that his young character's regency ends and he can finally make decisions for his realm on his own just to be met with a million game popups where he has to click OK to unpause the game (idk if they fixed that in CK3, but it's the worst part of CK2 and EU IV)
@@Schinshikssthat’s basically how I learned to play HOI4
We need some positive feedback too. Alerting you when you're about to do something stupid only teaches how *not* to play the game. Perhaps we could offload some of the work to a computer-controlled character to immediately demonstrate the impact of your decision without needing you to make the relevant actions to put it into motion. So after learning unit counters in a strategy game, you could be asked to synthesize it by building an army of your choosing based on a visible enemy composition. Once you're satisfied, you send them to an AI commander, who proceeds to use them in whatever way they deem optimal based on how the most intelligent AI profile is programmed. The camera auto-pans to the battle, and you get immediate feedback on how well your unit composition fared without needing to understand how to position them, time their abilities, cycle their frontlines, or any of the other micromanagement that comes with the minutia of battle
Idk about other strategy games but the AI in total warhammer does not know how to use units at all other than, keep archers in the back and cycle charge cavalry units. So giving command of your units to an AI is probably not an effective visualizer of how unit counters work since all the AI does is hurl them against eachother. AI in that game has to even use blatant cheats to stand a chance against a decent player.
I think that would be great for obvious things, like stuff that it makes no sense not to do cuz it’s so good should def be reinforced, maybe even with a hint at how they could improve further, only problem being the developers would need to know what’s good in their game
Just don't overdo it, or you'll end up with Hop repeatedly reinforcing the fact that yes, you do indeed know about type advantages.
@@invenblocker I happened to just find it funny that Hop still thinks it's amazing that I, the Pokemon champion of the Galar region, do in fact know about type advantages/disadvantages. And it's honestly designed to be played by very small kids so we as adults that happen to like those games just have to live with some hand holding.
Age of empires two. As a third world child I knew it without knowing well a computer. The tutorial campaing is so good and engaging.
D E S T R O Y T H E E N G L I S H O U T P O S T !
It was the first time for me to understand that different mouse buttons have different functions. Also I could not find the quit game button on the menu because it was placed on the top and I was just assuming it was the title and not a pressable button.
Wololo!
I think a big part of the difficulty with designing a tutorial in complex strategy games is that most of the enjoyment comes from how all the different systems interact, and if you try to spread the mechanics and tutorials for them throughout the game the way you might in a puzzle game like Portal so that the player can play the "real game" without sitting through a long tutorial first, you are instead just making them play a bad version of the game.
That's why I love Bayonetta - when I was stuck I could just practice my combos between loadings. I had all the time I wanted to redo what the game wanted me to do and to hone my skills further.
My only issue with sprinkling tutorial as the game progresses is that it often feels inorganic. Games introduce something new, explain it, then you immediately use it, and then rarely see it again. When done poorly it makes games feel segmented instead of a cohesive experience, and it removes creativity and removes the players need to think
Or when you get close to someting and you're trying to apply something else you've learned and now you made a new tutorial show up that you dont' have time to read? Like exactly what The Witcher 3 does in this video?
You made me smile from the "oh that was the one I made up". That's good design
Clicked on this video because I wanted to figure out ways to easily teach mechanics for my homemade board games. Turns out I already do the "splitting up tutorials during gameplay" strategy, and for my current project I have a list of alternate rules that either strip down mechanics of the game to make it easier for new players or turn those mechanics up to 11 just in case there's anyone who gets insanely good at it in the future.
The only one I didn't think of is UI design, or in my case, the design of the cards and play pieces.
For example, the current project I'm working on is a Sonic the Hedgehog themed card game. In most games, Health=Hearts, but in Sonic games, Health=Rings. It's a staple mechanic. My project assumes all players have at least a surface knowledge of Sonic games, but in the case that they don't, I'll make a few quick-reference cards to explain Health=Rings and other mechanics.
My problem with "complex" games' tutorials is that even with all that, they're hardly complete. When i found myself watching hours long playthroughs of Civilization 5 to understand the basics beyond "how the interface works" i decided i didn't like the game *that* much
I have Civilization on the Switch and barely touched it. Never played a Civ game and started to work through the tutorials and just .... stopped. I've been meaning to look up video tutorials on UA-cam, but it annoys me that I have to. It's like they expect every player to be a veteran.
A complex game like that needs a good tutorial system. Not like Pokemon that has too much tutorial telling you how to do stuff that doesn't need it. "This is a pokemon mart. You can buy stuff here" It's a mart. I know how they work...
yeah, i think of civ 5 as a game with a couple sets of money, determined by the buildings you build, science, culture, fairh and gold, and those allow you to make changes, altho i think with civ the main minutiae is just knowing what buildings to build, and that’s a good question. just build everything
Civ 5 vanilla is also my first civ game. Although I enjoyed the game a lot thanks to the fantastic visual feedbacks, I didn't understand one of the core mechanics of the game for a long time. That is, the tiles don't get worked if there isn't enough population to support it. I always prioritized production tiles and so built mines instead of farms without realizing I am not working them. It took me a long time to figure out I need 1 citizen per tile and even longer to understand that I could task my citizens from the menu. Happiness and culture were far easier to understand. In fact, I always rushed culture with Stonehenge in my early games because that was the part I understood the most.
Def, it gets even worse for some games, eu4s tutorial and loading tips not only don't tell you how to play but give "advice"/"lessions" that harm the player. And hoi4s tutorial is pretty much just thowing you into a game, paradox games are a great lesson on what NOT to do in tutorials
@@firestar5879 well they do tell you to start as ottomans
For the hundred Time Even though you have 1000h in the game and you have like 50% of the trophies. Not to mention the fact that in de facto turtorial you start as spain
I love complex games but I'm dyslexic, 1 in 6 people in the UK have dyslexia but we're a constantly forgotten massive minority, a lot of games, particularly complex ones require reading large blocks of small text that they think is a good idea to put in god dam stylised fonts, making it take ages for me to process any of the information that are trying to give.
@@loturzelrestaurant wait the books font and content is actually written with dyslexics in mind? That's pretty cool given that demigods are supposedly dyslexic
Ironically, sounds like a situation where default use of Comic Sans might have been welcomed
Nothing, for me, beats the tutorial in Breath of the Wild. I remember the first time I woke up in the Great Plateau, and I remember the sheer level of freedom I felt not only in how to go about my objectives, but where I would explore after being freed from the high walls. It was breathtaking stuff, and there are precious few games that instill such magic into the first hours.
Nintendo makes the best tutorials / newcomer-friendly design. It's a major pillar of their design process.
My favourite bit at the start was when I had to cross a large gap to get to one of the shrines. After evaluating on how to approach it, I wondered if I could use something as a bridge. Sure enough, there was a tree in range so if you cut from the right side it will fall perfectly. I didn't think about it until later, but the old man can be found cutting trees in that area, and just nearby is his logging hut with an axe. They clearly intended you to use the tree to get across because of the environment, but didn't have to stop me and say "hey, you can cut down trees to make bridges".
I will say though, the one thing I got stuck on was how to cook food the first time. It didn't immediately click that I need to first hold the ingredients and then walk up to a cooking pot, instead of just activating the pot to cook as almost every other game does. I don't remember if the old man hints anything about cooking, but that could've been made clearer by having him sit by a pot and say something like "how are you gonna cook with no ingredients out?" That would give you a hint that you need to hold the ingredients to cook without being full on tutorial mode.
@@leetri A big part of why that works is that almost everything in BOTW works and reacts like you would intuitively expect it to. Hit a tree with an axe? Of course the tree falls. Is it made of wood? It'll catch fire. Of course that includes your arrows if you hold them into a fire, why not? Congrats on your fire arrow! Are you holding a big metal thing during a thunderstorm? You bet you are being a lightning rod right now. Is it cold? Holding a flaming sword will keep you warm.
I could probably list more examples, but it's been a while since I played the game. The point is, your knowledge of the real world translates a lot to knowledge about the game world (which, if I type it out like that, is pretty much one of the points made in the video).
My first total war game was Rome I, and I have great memories of that tutorial. It starts you off with very few decisions that you have to make, but at the same time you are playing the game right away, to the extent that I've gone back and played the tutorial again even though I had hundreds of hours in the game at that point
Same here.
Then I moved on to Medieval II and it was awesome. Didn't play a tutorial because I didn't need to. It's sufficiently more complex, but similar enough to where I could apply my previous knowledge from Rome.
Then, I tried Shogun II, and it was a mess. Struggled a bit and gave up. I'm sure it's a great game, but just no. Couldn't do it.
And I managed to break through the walls of EU4, CK2 and HOI4, so I don't think it's because I give up easily.
Dark Souls tutorials ”heres how you attack now first boss”
And in this way it shows you that in this series dying is a part of gameplay/experience. Overall I really liked DS1 tutorial.
Yeah the DS1 tutorial was great. An entire area just devoted to step-by-step moving you through, starting with a tiny room that makes sure you learn how to do simple actions, and even having you pick up and equip your basic gear. They even give you a little hint for making your (probable) first boss battle easier by teaching you how to plunge attack, though it's unfortunate that plunging on bosses is only really done in those two places.
@@GrimmerPl As a Souls fan I have to disagree: most people expect the game to entertain them, not to be a tool to be manipulated to have fun. People generally don´t make that connection of "Combat is a puzzle to be solved with the tools I have, one of them beeing retrospection through the ability to try as often as I want to". Instead they just think: "wow, this game stinks, let´s play something better (easier)". I think the main issue with tutorializing people on a game that is about making your own decisions, is to keep peoples minds fresh and available, as they will just do, whatever you tell them to do. Fromsoftware does not like the idea, to just follow instructions, I think. Do whatever YOU want, even if its deinstalling the game.
"Here's how you attack"
"Here's how you block"
"Here's how you dodge"
"You heal with this thing"
"Ok, that's it, now here's a boss specifically designed to punish your overly passive beginner's playstyle have fun!"
@@gurkenskoppie I mean, I'm only entertained by games if I'm figuring things out, solving things or overcoming challenges. I don't expect a game to be fun if I don't put the effort in to succeed, because my idea of fun involves being faced with a problem and thinking "how do I go about this"? I think that's why I mostly play action games that are known for being "challenging"; seeing my character get chopped to bits in seconds is reassuring to me, because otherwise I often end up thinking "sure, I'm getting by so far, but could this strategy screw me over later in the game? Am I understanding these mechanics correctly?". Getting killed within a minute lets me know that no, I'm not doing it right. That's just me though, we all learn differently.
No amount of tutorials is gonna fix my incompotency, Mark. No matter how easy the game is.
Exactly. Why are people calling Fortnite a baby game when the building thing is one of the most complex shit I’ve ever seen
@@DarshanBhambhani I think the idea is that anyone can pick up the game and get somewhat good at it. But then there is also some really difficult things to keep more advanced player engaged.
same. it took until my 3rd stellaris campaign before i realized that building research buildings increased my research rate.
@@DarshanBhambhani Fortnite was supposed to be more explorative and have a single player campaign... I will never let anyone mention this game without stating this, it's relevant no matter what the subject is... :/
6:30 - For anyone who doesn't know, the made up fighting game term is "Bivouacing". (He actually states that later on in the vid, but whatevs! :D )
* "Trip Guard" means that you, when landing from a jump, can immediately go into a block to avoid taking damage. Many fighting games have a few frames after landing where you can't immediately attack, but can block - that's a Trip Guard.
* "Frame Data" refers to information on how long things take to happen after you attack. You can imagine attacks as general having 3 stages.. a "wind-up" where your character is starting an attack, an "active" period where your attack can actually do damage, and a "cool-down" where your character resets to their original position ready to attack again, as well as the opponent having a certain number of frame of reaction if they block or get hit. Each of those is measured in the number of frames they take to happen; stronger attacks usually taking longer, and have proportionately longer wind-ups and cool-downs where you're open to attack. By studying the frame data of moves, you can figure out how risky or safe they are, and sometimes development specific responses to certain moves (IE "if I block their standing roundhouse, I get out of stun three frames before their cool-down ends, and that's enough time for me to throw out a jab and get a combo started"). Modern games usually let you see the explicit frame data in training modes.
* "Happy Birthday" is a term from team games like Marvel vs Capcom where you control one active fighter at a time, and can call in other team members to do single attacks. Sometimes, you might be able to do an attack on an enemy when they've called in a teammate that hits both of them, meaning you're getting in free extra damage against a character who would normally be out of play. It's often seen as the opponent "gifting" you that extra damage, and because you get gifts on your birthday - Happy Birthday. (This culminated in this clip from a Skull Girls tournament, which includes a character Big Band that has a super where the player can mash out tunes - ua-cam.com/video/rZnKAUqwCjA/v-deo.html )
* "Turtling" refers to the strategy of spending a lot of your time crouch-blocking and biding your time for a good chance to hit back. Crouch-blocking usually gives the opponent relatively few options for ways to get a good hit on you, with the tradoff being an obvious reduction in your own mobility.
* "Pretzel Motion" refers to a particular special move input used in some fighting games (start with the stick Back, then snap it across and move it into a half circle Forward > Down > Back, then snap it across to Forward again), the idea being that particular motion traces a shape a bit like a knotted pretzel, but is sometimes used more generically to refer to the types of half- and quarter-circles based motions used in a lot of fighting games in general.
Bivouacing is a term for sleeping outside without shelter, and AFAIK is not a fighting game term.
By the way, Civ V's approach of breaking up learning works extremely well even if you start the game with the two major expansions activated (like I did).
This works because there's a good gap between introducing the mechanics of each expansion. The base game is learned in the early eras. Gods and Kings introduces religion mechanics which only come into significance far later in history (and are also not necessary to learn).
Finally, Brave New World is introduced when you're in the Modern Era and have already played a campaign for around ten hours. In my opinion, it's elegantly structured.
17:17 "And play test your tutorials, like, a lot"
That's actually an interesting topic. How does one effectively play test a game/tutorial in the first place, given a limited budget?
Do I just go out and find some random person who has never played my game and ask them to play it in front of me? Do I hire play testers only to immediately fire them once they've played my game once, because by then they have learned its mechanics and cannot effectively play test anymore?
Do I release the game to a limited audience and implement data collection features into my game (disclosed, of course) to find out how well the players understood my game?
It honestly seems like an issue that is very hard to approach as an indie dev.
You can ask for you family, friends, go to a forum, game events, anime events, local school ask for permission, stuff like that.
AAA can have their test team at any time but that does not mean you can't find people to test your game.
Just have a table and ask some questions before start so you know if the person has any knowledge from the type of game you are building or even any game.
and if the person plays for 1 minute and says... "Sorry idk what is going on, I don't like game". You can try to help or let the person go. but always take notes.. whatever is the result.
Recruiting playtesters is up there with marketing as something you have to invest time, and at least a little money, into during development. You can reach out broadly to folks who are interested in your game, and then sort them into cohorts based on genre/subject experience. I find it's better to put people together who have similar levels of exp - otherwise new people defer to those with more experience, defeating the purpose.
Something I was told is to do the tutorial last so you don't need to update the tutorial for every new mechanic added
An ideal situation would be to get a bunch of people of different experience levels to play your tutorial for the first time while recording footage which you can review and discus with them later. Having access to a recording will help you identify problems the testers themselves will have a hard time identifying, for example if your tutorial asks players to navigate to a certain menu and several players click on the wrong button to get there but get it right on the second try they would be unlikely to mention that in verbal or written feedback but you'll be able to see the pattern and might want to change some icons to make them more clear.
An open beta might be a good way to do this, as long as you also gather feedback from players. Daemon X Machina did this effectively by releasing essentially the tutorial and first few missions as a free demo before the game's launch, then a few months later they uploaded a video showing how they changed parts of the game to address the feedback they received.
One of my least favorite things in gaming in general, is restricting EVERYTHING but a super specific path the tutorial wants you to take. This is especially bad when it comes to unskippable tutorials. I have so many games I want to replay but i just can't stomach those first 20-30 minutes of not being able to do ANYTHING but what the tutorial wants me to.
This is why starting Twilight Princess was such a struggle for me. I also hate redundant text, which is why I quit Animal Crossing.
@@NickSchoenfeld going back to any zelda game is like that, TBH. I started Links Awakening remake on switch and when the owl flew in i was like here we go again and had flashbacks to the last time i played it, 20 years ago, and jamming B on my gameboy until he stfu
God, this is what I HATE about Monster Hunter World. The way the campaign is made assumes that every single new start is someone who's completely new to the game, or new to Monster Hunter in general.
So many games I can’t replay because of the forced tutorial
A part of this video reminded me of an important lesson I learned while getting a game design degree. I was developing my final game project with a team. I was in charge of making the research system and UI. I placed all the important buttons in the top middle section of the UI; things like "Begin Research" and "Exit". Our teacher recorded his first playtest of the prototype, which ended poorly when he got stuck in the research menu. He could NOT figure out how to exit the menu, despite the big "Exit" button almost center screen. He started spam clicking all over the screen, getting pretty upset, saying that the UI was broken, and the game was unplayable. We got a failing grade.. When we reached out to him and pointed out the "Exit" button he admitted he had not even seen it. (He changed our grade after playtesting again)
I learned that most people expect the exit button to be in the top right of the UI because that is where Windows places their close button. I moved the buttons and just to be safe I also added three alternative ways to close the menu; the escape key, pressing the research button again, and clicking the main game screen behind the UI.
Sorry for the long read but I look back on this and think its hilarious. I wish I still had the playtest recording!
I'm reminded of Lobotomy Corporation's Manager's Manual, which contains almost all the information the player will need to succeed in a relatively succinct way. However, certain *extremely* important information is delivered before it relevant. I've seen people not realize that the rank of armor is immensely more important than the stats of the armor even though it's stated in the manual that they read.
And when you started talking about repeat playthroughs giving more complex tutorials, I was reminded even more of Lobotomy Corporation, which has so much retreading of ground that it's referenced in the story. They could've stated or restated information that's more important for late-game when it actually starts to become a problem.
It's a good idea that I haven't seen other people talk about.
I really liked the way the board game "Root: A Game of Woodland Right and Might" did its tutorials, both in its physical and digital versions (which had different tutorializations).
The physical version had three different rulebooks: a full detailed set of rules with indexed sub-rules for easy lookup (not intended to be read comprehensively), a "quick rules" rulebook (intended to be read by at least one person), and a "quick tutorial" book (which consisted of two sample rounds for a four-player game, to teach most of the rules of most factions). The "player boards" have good instructions to assist as well.
The digital version had a tutorial for each faction that gets you started for a few turns, then tells you to earn some fixed number of points to win. It then has single-player "challenges" if you still don't feel ready that let you understand how things play, and also serve the role of emphasizing various mechanics more at times (so that by the time you're done with them, you've "felt" all the mechanics).
In some ways it's different than the complex games indicated here (being a board game), but not entirely - the fact that each faction has its own core mechanics, with the way they are balanced against each other, has some similarity to the many interweaving systems of these complex games.
Ah, Root. I really like the game but it is really just a pain to teach.
I've still only had the chance to play that game once, but I really enjoyed it. It's been a while, but if I remember correctly, one thing it does well to help experienced players introduce new players is that certain factions are simpler than others. They're still balanced, but it's easier for a new player to pick up a certain faction on their first game while they're still figuring everything out, then go for a more complex faction on replays once they're more familiar with the basics, similar to the "strip out systems on easier difficulties" method of teaching mentioned in this video. Specifically, I think I was playing the "Vagabond" faction, where you only have to worry about one unit and managing your own stuff, but you have to watch and interact with the other players and thus learn a bit about how they play their more complex factions.
The thing with crusader Kings is
There is no real "good way to play"
The game is more about learning the game systems so you can do what you want out of it.
And as it is not so visual it is really hard to explain these systems.
But when you know them it is so godaimn good.
You could make some scripted events, like "all your vassals are upset at you for some reason and will cause you a lot of headache if you don't act now."
a few need to be bribed, swayed, threatened,...
(Explains the diplomacy systems)
one wants his de jure land you are holding
(Explains the concept of domain, de jure titles, and shows that giving land is a way to keep vassals loyal)
another one wants to have control over a local city you are the liege of for some unknown reason,
(Explains the feudalist system, with lieges and vassals, and that to keep an eye out for vassals that shouldn't be yours)
one needs to be killed
(arguably the most important system, could show the consequences when it goes wrong too...)
one needs you to be more pious
(Explains piety, how to get it and what effects it can have)
one needs you to gain more prestige
(explains prestige, how to get it via decisions, its effects,...)
And a few will rise up against you regardless. You need to beat them in a war. You conveniently receive a marriage proposal for your son from a neighbor. By accepting it you receive an ally, shows how marrying family members off to other countries will get you an alliance. You eventually beat the traitors, they are sent to your prison, where you can revoke their titles, punish them how you see fit or release them if you feel merciful.
I'm fairly certain you can incorporate a lot more of the systems in this little tutorial (lifestyle, developing your domain, technology, raiding, casus belli, tyranny, inheritance,...). By creating a situation where you need to use a system, pointing the player where he can find it and immediately show the consequences of their actions you "show don't tell" the tutorial.
CK3 also locks some of its features behind perks, so you'll do, and thus learn, different things when playing different characters. You probably won't do too much scheming if your character is a do-gooder who throws parties, and once you have a character suited for warfare you might try to look at it more deeply.
I think you could get away with doing scenarios to teach the player certain game aspects. There are some wonderful set pieces you could use to limit the scope of the game a bit to just focus on combat and espionage over a set amount of years, i.e. one of the Scottish wars for independence limiting things to a short set amount of years and just to the countries effected. You could then add in a longer set piece like a couple of the crusades put together or the 100 years war to add in lineage mechanics and letting the player playing king more so than playing warlord. I know it is not a perfect example but with some work I could see something like this working. I know it would help my crusader kings gameplay personally.
Right but at this point they are designing exclusively for folks who are already Paradox fans. But the downside is that they have to work very hard to retain that small base, and get all possible revenue out of them - so that means lots of DLC, and a greater reluctance to moderate the more toxic side of the community. Opening up your game's design to new people can make the experience better for existing players too.
I mean going to war is a lot more useful then diplomacy.
So you're telling me I should list Proficient Crusader Kings player on my resumé?
You could but it would probably be more effective to list the reasons why you are a proficient crusader kings player instead. Being able to focus for long periods of time and consume large amounts of information are skills not everyone has and are traits a lot of employers like.
Put crusader kings world conquest by inheritance on your resume and you'll be a wanted by every employer
No mention of factorio
Game is just like "Here's the best game ever, figure it out your damn self goodbye"
Try dwarf fortress. After years i finally got a hang of it a few weeks ago xD
But there's a great free-to-play tutorial/demo with lots of very helpful tips and tricks!
But you definitely got the "best game ever" part spot on!
Dude, thats WHY its the best game ever. A step by step guide would just devalue the experience.
Factorio has a pretty good tutorial imo. It has you start with the basics of mining, smelting and inserters, and slowly moves on to simple base defense, automation of crafting (the basis of the entire game) and then making science, before dropping you into a destroyed base and letting you relatively off the leash and research decently far into the first two sciences, and introducing trains, one of the most important ways of transporting items in the game, without really being too overwhelming. The tutorial is honestly great fun and doubles as a demo. It gets you just far enough that you understand the basic concepts of automating smelters, crafting and research, and pollution and the biters, and then cuts you off before you reach the truly complex parts of the game so you can go into those things in the full experience.
apart from the trains, factorio is very easy
You absolutely summed up my frustrations with 4X tutorials; I remember bouncing off Crusader Kings hard because just how graph heavy and counter intuitive the UI is.
As someone who never played the tutorial for CK2, the use of tool tips and the alert bar at the top got me through my first game.
There’s a concept Mark Rosewater, lead designer of magic the gathering calls “lenticular design”; it’s the idea of designing things so that they are read differently to new players vs invested players. I think CK does that fairly well; you can get relatively far by blundering your way through and only learning about systems when they become organically relevant to your play through via reading the tool tips.
@@liampoulton-king7479 That's great for either folks who don't mind frustration or a DIY tutorial experience, but a lot of players don't have enough time+patience for either of those.
I stopped playing stelaris after like 20 minutes cuz of the giant text walls lmao
I bounced off of every other Paradox strategy, but I feel CK3 was okay. I still don't have the mastery of it that I do of Civ, but it's not bad.
@@mandisaw I mean, what I’m trying to get across is that I’m not a person who enjoys trying to intuit oblique mechanics, so the fact that I was able to learn and enjoy Crusader Kings relatively quickly is evidence that it’s mechanics can be discerned quickly enough through tooltips.
If one feels incapable of playing a game without knowing exactly how every mechanic works before starting, then it’s a bigger problem. And I agree that CK’s tutorial is garbage. I would just encourage people to try learning through play if they are curious. And if anyone has questions during their game, they can feel free to DM me.
I studied a bit about adult learning last year, and it’s no surprise to learn that adults become very bored very quickly if the thing they’re learning isn’t involving. The bit in the video about investment balanced against a tutorial is absolutely spot-on; nobody will learn anything unless they’re driven to do it for some reason.
For me, the best tutorials bar none are found in Portal and Breath of the Wild. They are so seamless and you don’t even know you’re being taught, but at the same time you’re being released to practice your skills on your own terms. It’s never restrictive, or at least it never feels restrictive. I get the most frustrated in games when it’s stopping me every few seconds to explain a complex mechanic (usually a static menu) which I’ll never remember by the time I need to actually use it. Just let me go! BotW is masterful at this, by not even letting you out of the cave until you can climb, then giving you a tiny sandbox to explore, with the /suggestion/ of a direction to go, and gradually making that sandbox bigger as you follow the path. The developers of Portal found the perfect balance between teaching basics then then gradually ramping up the challenge. Press button to open door. Now put cube on switch to open door. Now press button to get cube to do the thing, etc. Eventually you’re flying through the air and throwing cubes at turrets to get past the obstacles. In BotW you’re throwing book cases at Lynels and flying through the air while clinging to rocks!
One thing that might hold tutorials back the most is the need to assess gamers as competent at a task before showing them the next thing. Back to Portal, you need to open a few doors before you’re even shown your first portal gun. In that time the developer has to teach you how to look, how to move, how to interact, and how to carry stuff. You literally cannot progress through the game unless you are able to master these skills, and what’s more, while these seem like easy FPS skills to seasoned players, the game has to assume that you’ve never played any video games at all. The assessment there is built into the game itself, so therefore it’s a fully interactive and automatic assessment. In BotW on the starting plateau there’s a moment where you need to go to a frosty area, and you’re given the choice to either earn some warm clothes, or brew a meal that gives Link the ability to withstand cooler temperatures for a limited time. The game here is letting you decide, and if you complete the task then you’re deemed competent to travel to frozen climates and survive. You will have then demonstrated your ability to 1) make a choice, 2) apply the appropriate items at the right time and place, and 3) survive and return to safety. That’s quite a complex set of tasks, and once again the assessment is built into the game as part of the organic experience.
The big question is: how do you assess players to be able to play text- and menu-heavy games like city builders and RTSs? Devs need to assume complete innocence of any gameplay mechanics while not comping across as condescending to seasoned gamers; it can be safely assumed that one knows how to use a computer if they can turn it on and launch the game to begin with, so you don’t need to tell them what a mouse is at first. Players respond well to narrative interactions (for example, one can be tasked by an existing in-game master like the military general with collecting wood for a while) which can then lead to a narrative-driven reason to progress (the general must take the army to defend the city - I know wood collecting is boring but please keep doing it because it’s important) which then leads to an event that causes hardship to be overcome (the general and half his army have been killed, please help!) leading to new possibilities (we need to you help rebuild the barracks) before a grand opportunity opens up (take this platoon of soldiers and establish a new outpost).
Biggest info in this video:
"CK3 have a tutorial!" O.O
My way to PDX game is: watch some lets plays, press some buttons, read some tooltips, restart and repeat.
That used to be the only realistic way to learn their games, but they've gotten a lot better at tutorials and tooltips.
Trying to learn CK2 without DLC after it all came out was a fucking nightmare. The UI is stuffed with references to mechanics you haven't bought, the tutorial hasn't been updated in 12 years, buttons are nearly indistinguishable from decoration, the language is archaic and unexplained, income numbers are monthly some times and yearly others with no real indication which is which.
In CK2 characters have a symbol of... something? and when you hover over it the text says: Craven.
In CK3 there's another weird symbol and the text says: Craven. This character is a coward, less likely to defy their liege and take risks.
And then if you hover over "liege" it explains what that means!
Imagine if an fps game told you "If your intention is to ejaculate an object of excellent ballistic quality with the capacity to cause harm on man, beast, and indeed object, depress the leftmost piece atop the mouse which engages a mechanism" instead of "Left click to shoot"
That's kinda how i learned Stellaris after playing 1000's hours of HoI4, which i learned through a Germany game with cheats so that i learn what does what. After that i learned i can mod stuff, and there i learned all the weird mechanics to break the game (it was during 1.5.4) and now i am trynig to rush mech production while creating collaboration govs to get those compliance points.
@@gildedphoenix u get compliance by creating collaboration government? I never knew that I thought they were only to help capitulate America or USSR faster endgame.
@@NaderBerbish you get compliance by doing the Collaborationist spy missions. And you can get 90% compliance if you can successfully complete at least two of them. (But they take half a year to prepare and another half to run it. As Germany, you wanna run this on all majors to get their factories without spending unnecessary amounts of garrison equipment.
@@NaderBerbish more like collab governments give 100% manpower so you can steal it. Also can trade with 80 resource per civ. Lastly they give 75% factories. They're useful for someone like me who like Free Trde law too much.
This video feels like 40 minutes long. Not because it was boring, but instead it has so much to say and so many ideas. Loved the video.
As someone quite fond of complex 4X games, I've found that even as someone who wants to learn them, I tend to avoid playing the tutorial and simply throw myself into a campaign and fiddle around the menus for a while and just learn through experience. I feel something that allows you to just start engaging and bringing up tutorials as things come up and advisors to help you with choices (but never saying "PRESS THIS BUTTON DO IT") is probably how I would like to see it done
I love how for "tooltips within tooltips" you show crusader kings 3
I have definitely spent far too long messing around with them
Well now we know why this channel focuses so much on first/third person games at the expense of everything else!
The point you made is HUGE. I play games for fun, but also to develop my second language skill (in Japanese) and that has really highlighted how cumbersome dropping so much at once really is. I had to spend 45 minutes (probably 20 if I was native in Japanese) learning about all the features of my base, most of which I am not ready to use yet.
To walk forward, press "W"
Good!
To walk backwards - press "S"
Nice job!
...
: in a souls game
To look around, use your mouse.
Man you're a genius!
that was ok back in the day when not many people were familiar with video games in general
@@phir9255 Apparently today there are many people who are not familiar with video games.
@@jetstreak2786 well there are actually but for some reason it was more ok back then
I think factorio did a pretty good job at its tutorial with it's short campaigns trying to solve specific problems and a playable tutorial you can play anytime during your game.
I was gonna cite factorio too. Great game
The inverted pyramid at 3:48 reminded me of Factorio, since the amount of stuff you have to worry about scales with how much you've built and researched.
16:13 "d'wah, it's a cute happy zebra"
16:22 "oh....the zebra is pooping" 😂
I recorded loads of footage of Planet Zoo and there was a Zebra pooping in every shot it was impossible
@@GMTK But now you can use your game world knowledge in real life. Now the gameplay has taught you to block your nose near a zebra
Civilization has always looked really scary, but it doesn't take long for you to feel comfortable and in control. Watching a few videos about different things is super helpful.
Imagine this kind of stuff applied to software like Blender, Unreal Engine, Unity, Photoshop, Zbrush, Houdini, etc. when you launch them for the first times. In how many of them you stopped learning because of overwhelming UI and bad designed in-software tutorials?
Learning to code in general is riddled with bad teaching methods that make it hard for people to get interested in the first place.
If it was easy to do it would have been done already is all I would say
@@GaussianEntity I thought it was just me. When I finally started grasping some rudimentary coding skills, I was confused -- why is this stuff taught in such a confusing, arbitrary fashion?
My trick is to treat it kind of like learning a spoken language. I write out what I want the code to do in a plain English sentence, then convert it a piece at a time until it's programmable formula.
Blender and shit like that is made for people who already know what they're doing.
@@phir9255 for people born taught, such an elite hahaha
Another thing to remember about tutorials in my opinion is that you don't need to teach the player how to play optimal, just make him get by and trust that he'll get better over time by himself ...or not, that's okay too. I played a lot of games very sub-optimal and only later found out about it, but I still had a ton of fun regardless.
For far too many "complex games," I've always just stopped playing them in the middle of the tutorial. Tutorials that always get in the way are the ones I really despise.
In the same vein of not assuming your players have played other games, you can't assume that your players have used external tools like google sheets. I still think using the same icon is a good choice (better than making up a new one), just make sure that players who haven't seen that icon before will still know where to go.
Games are really streamlined here for most part, compared to engeneer/graphical softwere, that still operates like early two thousands eurojunk. I've a dream to pass EU resolution forcing universal control scheme for everything. :D
@@antonisauren8998 that wholly depends on the genre, I'm afraid. Some genres operate on a universal control and mechanics scheme (the shooters are the posterboys for this), while others operate in their own fiefdoms (I'm looking at you RTSes, RTTs, simulators, and the like). It's the latter that is literally killing themselves because they have fandoms whose stick is basically, 'if I can't have it my way, *_THEN NO ONE WILL_* when I'm done with it!'.
I mean, look what happened with Anno, 2205 was an experiment that was _absolutely needed_ at the time... but a portion of the player base would rather see it all *_BURN_* than have the series more accessible. Yet, 1800 is considered the second-best Anno game _EVER_ (second to only Anno 2070 for most of the fandom).
Victoria II players: I got my masters in economics just to attempt to play this game.
I found Victoria II to be the easiest of Paradox's historical grand strategy games to get into, in part because there are fairly easy to find easy countries where you can basically start out bad at everything, not really understand what any of these spreadsheets and sliders mean/do and still do OK at them.
Prussia is a great easy tutorial nation, you are powerful, as you are likely to be largely land based, Eurocentric, and conservative you can ignore a lot of the game and the map, you have clear event chains telling you the path you most likely want to take through the game, and your pops are diverse enough to give you and idea of why they matter but homogeneous enough that mismanagement can usually be solved with a couple armies. And is you just go with the flow by the end of the game you likely have the feeling that you built a glorious empire, even if you likely will also be aware that you didn't do it by playing the good guys.
From there you can move on to more colony based powers, then smaller more vulnerable European nations or developing nations, and finally you can install PDM and really get into it.
LOVED THIS
XD
Yes capitalist are dumb they want to build clipper factory everywhere !
1 thing that really stands out in a game is when I feel like the entire game is a tutorial, when a game teaches new things for 95% of the game, it starts feeling a bit like you are never truly knolodgeable about most things, and when you come back to replay that game you know everything, but you only get to actually do everything you used to untill you actually get to that 95% of the game, wich feels lie it defeats the point of the invisible tutorial if it's done very slowly
This is something I really noticed in plague tale, that game was mostly based on stealth, but I often found that I was constantly getting a new abilitie, wich I never got to use, or was extremely situational, wich when I got to the end sections of the game, I found myself feeling like I had no idea what I should do, or simply felt like the game was pushing me, wich would be fine if it had been done for more time before hand, and all the mechanics were introduced earlier
yet I also can't handle extremely tedious long tutorials, for obvious reasons
"These days" he says, showing fallout 3 and Half life 2
Nothing but love to this channel though
I feel old
I grew up playing a city building game called Pharaoh. It was set in Ancient Egypt and you had to progress through a series of campaigns, each of which has specific aims. You can't progress until you complete the aims of that campaign. Each campaign only has certain systems turned on. The first campaigns take much less time to play than later ones. In addition, you start out furthest back in the past so it makes sense that those early settlements have fewer systems and simpler goals while later large scale cities require many many complicated systems.