Heya! I know I’ll want to add some form of tutorial to my game in the future, but I’m not sure how it’s best to do it.
Two types of tutorials I’m thinking of are: written, which is just a set of pictures and short explanations in a UI, which you can open up anytime later; “follow along”, which tells you what to do, and how to do it, possibly with cutscenes and stuff.
Personally, I dislike the “follow along” type tutorials, because they’re usually slow and boring, but I feel that kids would not read a written tutorial, and might end up getting frustrated and leave, after not knowing how to play the game.
But maybe a part of me doesn’t want to make a “follow along” tutorial because it would be an extra pain in the a**.
So, what do you think, is there a “one size fits all” type of tutorial? Which type of tutorial should I go for, if I feel that my game will also attract a younger audience?
If you can condense the information into brief explanations then that would be most effective. There’s no point stretching out what could be just a couple of sentences across several cutscenes and simulations; keeping things short and sweet will both retain players’ attention spans and be informative.
Forcing people to sit through tutorials isn’t always good for UX, so give players the option to skip the tutorial but allow them to revisit it at any point if they need to.
1 Like
I was never planning to make the tutorial unskippable, I just feel that the younger audience wouldn’t read or revisit the tutorial just because it’s written, and not as visually appealing, hence I made this post.
There’s not much you can do if people don’t know how to play the game but refuse to read a couple of tutorial sentences. In the vast majority of cases I don’t think this would even be a problem. The tutorial screen (assuming you use UI) just needs to be easy to read and appealing enough to not scare people away.
To make your text ‘kid-friendly’ make sure information is formatted clearly and concisely. Try to avoid complexity and only explain the fundamentals of the game rather than every single element in detail. Images would also aid players visually so adding some would also be a good alternative to text.
1 Like
Alright, thank you, I think I’ll manage to keep it concise but informative. My game by nature is one that the player needs to explore and learn themselves, so I only really need to explain the key aspects.
Try to make it as brief as possible, example - Press shift to sprint