A good developer knows that a good tutorial is essential to a game’s success. However, there seems to be a growing problem within Roblox. People aren’t reading texts.
Personal experience
Back when I made my first big game, I had a simple slideshow tutorial, showing pictures and words explaining how to play the game. However, whenever I joined a server, players still wouldn’t know how to play. I then added gameplay to the tutorial with a bit of reading. While players understood the big parts, they basically ignored the smaller details. I even tried forcing the tutorial at one point (it was skippable) but my players still didn’t know what to do!
How do I reasonably make a tutorial covering more advanced aspects of the game? Users will just skip over text, and certain gameplay elements just have to be explained.
Any personal experience of this? What are some ways you’ve overcame this issue? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
I’ve seen some games that explain the basics and go into further detail with “tips” that show up as the user explores the game/UI. I’ve also seen some that have a help screen/user manual with guides and answers to FAQs.
Whatever you do, don’t dump the entire game on a user in one go. Information overload is bad. Just explain the basics and let them learn more advanced things as they progress. No one wants to spend 5 minutes reading a super long tutorial.
Make sure you make the language in the tutorial as basic as possible. Sometimes kids simply don’t understand how things are worded or don’t understand the meaning of a word and the entire sentence will fly over their head.
Aim for simplicity. It’s hard to explain exactly why and without offending anyone, but younger players (like below 9 years of age) just don’t like complex things at all. How complex is up for interpretation, but clearly the bar is really really low.
I have a friend who owns a popular sandbox game, and he was the one who explained this to me. I help him with the game, but nearly every feature suggestion I give gets turned down for being “too complex”. Even something as simple as adding an option in the settings to toggle a feature was deemed too confusing for new players. Even though we are targeting the more mature demographics (this is an engineering sandbox game), the game’s audience is still largely kids, so we are forced to compromise and make the least impactful decision. This is frustrating, but there’s nothing we can do if we want to keep the game alive.
This issue with young players is called cognitive overload which @mosquitowo had mentioned earlier. Younger players are fragile and can easily feel overwhelmed and lose interest in a game. Reading is especially overwhelming for them in todays age where kids watch more videos than reading books, so it is something that they are not used to. You want the tutorial to be as straightforward as possible; minimize text and reading, maximize engagement and hands-on learning.
In my game none of them read, I am kind of lost of what to do as well and I have tried all the ways possible. I am trying as much as possible to keep the game play as simple as I can within next update but as of now, I can’t do much. When I look at the videos some players make about the game, they seem to click Next throughout the entire tutorial without reading even when the tutorial is interactive and simple enough.
That said, you are not alone, and I believe is just normal that everyone skips tutorials. I even myself when join some games skip or even get lost throughout the tutorials for not paying attention.
Though I agree I kind of hate when I join a server and see someone asking for the basics in the chat.
Why don’t you try making interactive / in the moment tutorials?
For example, if you are devving a combat game, make it so the players gets forcefully in a fight with punks (or whatever) and you teach them the basics (left click to deliver a light attack, right click to deliver a heavy attack and so on, adjusting it to your case)
Unfortunately most people playing games don’t read…
I have a boat obby, and some levels have hints (simple floating gui text) about very simple things like ‘wait for the rotating arm to pass’.
I’ll play the game occasionally and players ask 'how do I get past the arm?". I ask if they read the hint and they just say no.
I get your frustration.
people playing here have a low attention span (no offense, you know it, i know it + im not talking about all of them but kids yall know) so you dont have much time to explain them stuff through text or still images. So your goal is to explain them stuff in the most simple way you can without going into too much detail.Something like a simple billboard will also do to explain controls. Also if the game has some mechanics like Rocket Jumping then you can just add a tip bar and let them experiment. Lastly, make it appealing. You need to keep them engaged or else you will lose their interest very easily. You can do something like parkour (they use cool clones).
TLDR;
Dont go in detail
Let them experiment
Make it appealing.
Also if your tutorial exceeds 5 minutes for anyone, it has to be shortened. More it short, more it will be concise for the person to understand
A good idea is to hide the tutorial as much as possible. There are tons of examples of this, but often the break down to giving the player a new thing, a small zone where progression is based on them doing the thing you are trying to teach them, and then letting them experiment with the new mechanic. Of course that’s just the general idea. And of course, the mechanic and the zone need to be intuitive enough the player can pick it up naturally. To me at least, this is the best type of tutorial. It lets me get right into the game. This of course will not work for all games. Another approach is to give them the bare minimum to get started. Try to make it so that the game can be played without a full understanding of the details. If a player gets invested enough in a game, they will either go looking for the details, or pick them up naturally over time. Finally, try to minimize the amount of time and thought the player will have to expend on the tutorial. If you can make it so they can easily visualize what is happening tends to be effective. At the end of the day, players aren’t usually invested in your game until they’ve played it for a while which makes tutorials a bit of a paradox. If your game is so complex as to make it so that none of the above approaches or something similar won’t work, you’ll just need to accept that the game might be too complicated for a lot of the more casual players to dedicate time to learn.
Moral of the story is you want to increase engagement as much as possible while reducing the barriers of entry to playing the game.
First, really good tutorials are difficult and time-consuming to implement and really good tutorials for complex games are extremely time-consuming and difficult. Set your expectations accordingly.
A good technique I’ve seen and used is to “slow release” the experience. That is, you gate different game elements such that you can explain each piece in bite size elements as the player “progresses”. When done properly, this allows the player to have fun, feel a sense of progression and learn the game at the same time.
Many AAA titles use this technique and it works well in all sorts of settings including simple things like web pages and apps.
One recent example that comes to mind is Legend of Zelda (the two latest). They have entire starting zones that are gated for the first 30+ minutes of play and are 100% there to act as a tutorial for the game. But they made it fun with story driven elements and questing.
There is almost always a way to leverage this gating mechanism but it will also almost certainly take more work and thought than setting up a read-through start.