someone once told me that a frustratingly hard game has poor user retention. an unclear explanation / tutorial in the game can often lead to that.
unfortunately it is also known that an extremely-hand holding game also gets boring really fast, and since i’m likely going to explore a genre that probably 90% of the player base is new to (planned game has bullet hell mechanics) i don’t know how much should i plan to explain to them in the tutorial
Something that I personally have seen and like is this trio:
Initial tutorial being bare minimum to play.
Loading screens giving more advanced tips.
And a clear reference available for double checking mechanics.
The loading screen could be place change, death/respawn, etc. If there is repeated downtime, which bullet hells typically do, it works well.
how would it work in the case of a one v all bullet hell game (i actually have not seen this before anywhere)? generally in round-based games loading screens aren’t really common so i doubt i could utillize that much, but i guess the other 2 work in that case,
It doesn’t need to be long, a killed by screen with a hint on the bottom would suffice.
My personal preference would be a short video. Usually people aren’t wanting to see long tutorials. They want a quick and easy tutorial. You probably shouldn’t go less than 10 mins if you’re giving a tutorial on a long hard game. You will need time to explain. After recording the video, you should edit in tips and/or words explaining the game on the side of the screen.
You should design your game’s mechanics in a way that they’re not unnecessarily convoluted to understand. If you’ve already optimized your mechanics and you still have a lot to teach the player, then there are a few ways to approach this. Personally, I would start out by teaching the player the core basics of short-term gameplay, like a combat system. After they’ve practiced/trained a bit with it, I would move on to train them about long-term gameplay (i.e. classes and skill trees). The key to any good tutorial is pacing and good explanation- you don’t want to overwhelm your player with information. If you have a lot of information, you’ll likely want to teach them as they progress throughout the early game, as condensing EVERYTHING they need to know into one tutorial level will most certainly cause them to be overwhelmed with information and forget a lot of it.
Teach the player something, have them practice it until they’ve memorized it, then repeat. When you teach somebody how to play Chess, you teach them how the pieces move before you teach them about managing their economy of pieces.
The first few minutes of playing a game can make or break a game. Tutorials are a crucial part to the game experience but can sometimes overwhelm new players, or be too obtrusive to players who want to play the tutorial again.
Here are a few tips of my own for creating an optimal tutorial:
1. Have minimal text
Text is a bad way to deliver a tutorial, it kills pacing, creates boredom and will often get skipped by the very players that need it the most. Instead, your tutorial should be interactive and the player should play through the actions they have to learn. This not only creates a better experience for the player, but gets the player to understand what the tutorial was trying to teach them, whereas with text, once it ends you have no idea whether the player understood what the tutorial meant or not.
2. Don’t front load your tutorials
If you teach the player everything at the beginning then the player will be overwhelmed with information and have less engagement at the beginning. Throwing so much information at a player right away might mean they’re likely to have forgotten a lot about the game by the time they need it. It might also mean they get bored of the tutorial so they skip over it, rush through it or even just close the game, which is just a waste of the player and developers time. Instead you should provide information to the player progressively, introduce gameplay elements to the player as they get important. The player is allowed to get to gameplay faster, it allows you to give it to them in digestible chunks and it means that they’ll get to use the information you just provided right after they’ve learnt it
3. Make it fun
Players learn faster if it’s fun. The tutorials should be exciting and interesting, they should be as engaging as any part of the game. If you cant grab the players attention in the first few minutes of play, you’re going to lose a lot of your audience, which may lead to player count and monetisation losses, and the point of your tutorial is to make your game accessible to more people.
These are only 3 of my tips for tutorials, hopefully they helped you and good luck with creating your tutorial!
in my case, if i first teach them the very basics (how to move, etc), and then have a noob-friendly server only for new people where they can learn the other parts as they go, would you think this would be a good idea?
If there are levels implemented, I personally would implement a level system where lower levels can verse lower levels so it’s all balanced out. It honestly depends on what your game idea is. But yes, teaching the player about the game progressively is a good idea.