I have almost certainly written about this before, and I know I ranted about it on a podcast or two, but my dear, dear friends in the strategy game development business:<\/p>\n
DO NOT MAKE ME CLICK THROUGH A TUTORIAL THAT IS NO MORE THAN TEXT OR “CLICK HERE”.<\/p>\n
Tutorials are hard – this I understand and accept. Players come to the game with varying levels of experience, manuals aren’t what they used to be and won’t be read, and even experienced gamers like myself don’t have the time to just muddle through picking up not so obvious stuff as we go.<\/p>\n
Strategy games have it doubly hard since many have mechanics and math that defy the simple “move X to Y and see what happens” model. After all, I’ve also complained about the story based campaign that is no more than an extended tutorial, locking off options and alternatives if you already know what you are doing.<\/p>\n
But the static click through tutorial is a bad idea mostly because it prevents people who might otherwise be interested in pursuing and evangelizing your game or following you as a developer because it takes them too long to get to what they want to do, which is engage the mechanics directly. Considering how many demos include a tutorial level, this is not a small thing.<\/p>\n
My baseline rules for a good strategy game tutorial are simple:<\/p>\n
1) Does it explain the means to achieving the game goals in a clear manner?
\n2) If they are a central mechanic, does it let you tinker with tax\/production\/research settings and then see their effects?
\n3) Does it let you engage in combat and understand healing, bonuses, counters, etc.?
\n4) Does it tell you where you can find specific types of information and when this information will be useful? (Note: Saying, “click on X to see its characteristics and attributes” is not the same)
\n5) Does it let you play the tutorial mission past the point where the game gives you information? This is a way to try what has been learned in a very controlled or constrained situation.<\/p>\n
Not all of these apply to every strategy game, but it continually shocks me that I run into tutorials that are no more than either things to read or pat instructions with pre-destined outcomes.<\/p>\n
And this is the only time I will come out against reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have almost certainly written about this before, and I know I ranted about it on a podcast or two, but my dear, dear friends in the strategy game development business: DO NOT MAKE ME CLICK THROUGH A TUTORIAL THAT IS NO MORE THAN TEXT OR “CLICK HERE”. Tutorials are hard – this I understand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-J6","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2796"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2797,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796\/revisions\/2797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}