Tutorial Design Philosophies

Happy new year everyone! Apologies for the lack of posting, but I was on vacation, so, I didn't post. That's really all I have to say about it. Sorry!

Today, I'd like to talk briefly about some of my tutorial design theories. Back on City of Heroes, I designed the new tutorial for the free to play launch. I had also worked a bit on the Going Rogue tutorial. I realized now that MMO tutorials are starting to become one of my "things", so I'd like to sit back and analyze it a bit more. Tutorials honestly fascinate me, more than I thought they would - it's interesting to see the ideas people come up with to try to teach someone their game. I'll go into the details of the CoH tutorial in a later post regarding what went well, what could have been done better, etc., but today, I'll talk about the design philosophies I learned on City of Heroes for making tutorials.

First off, a tutorial for a free to play game is vastly different from a tutorial from a non-F2P game. The guys who make Uncharted aren't trying to convince you to buy the game through the tutorial, they're just there to help you understand the game. You've already bought the game, they already have your money. In contrast, a F2P tutorial is trying to both teach the player about the game and sell them on continuing to play the game; if it's boring, they'll leave, unless the person is really interested or already a fan of your game or genre. That's the rub, however, with a tutorial - how do you make it exciting, while also teaching the player what's going on?

One of the first steps is to not overload the player with too much work. It shouldn't be hard to explain to them the first steps of the game. While working on the CoH Freedom tutorial, I believed that a free player in the first 5 minutes has so little attachment to the game that they shouldn't be asked to do very much work to understand things. If you're not sure if you're interested in a subject, and then that subject asks you to do a lot of work, then chances are you're going to cut and run, as you have no attachment to urge you to do that work. As the player goes on, of course, they have more of an attachment to the game and can do a little more work to find out things: looking through menu's, waiting a few minutes for a queue to start for a team, etc. But the tutorial needs to be a well-oiled machine, where the player isn't asked to read a wall of text (like the one I'm writing now) or wait around for something to happen.

I sincerely believe one of the keys to this is to spread out what you teach in a tutorial. Many people have already said that if you're not going to use it in the next 3 minutes, don't teach it. As an example, the old City of Heroes tutorial explained how enhancements worked from the get go. However, you never needed to seriously use enhancements until level six, a full five levels afterwards, which, at that point, you've probably forgotten about what you learned in the tutorial. There was, in my opinion, no point in teaching that so early.

The main thing your initial tutorial has to do is arm the player with enough basic knowledge that they know how to play the game, that they feel free to do what they want in it. They should understand how to move, attack, talk, how do to quests, level up, and the location of their items, to name a few things (and I'm sure I've forgotten a few).

The rest of the details of the game can be spread out as the player goes along. The best way to do this, again in my opinion, is to let it meld with normal game play  I personally hate it when I see "TUTORIAL: How to..." on a mission, because I'm not going to do it. I don't want to spend my time on the game doing what is essentially a class, I want to learn it as I'm going along in a story. A great example of this was the Montague Castanella arc in City of Heroes, where you're collecting salvage from the mission and have to use that to create an invention. Up to that point, I had no idea how the invention system worked. However, after doing that arc, it all clicked once I hit create invention. I realized all that salvage I had could be used for the exact same thing!

Finally, going back to the tutorial, it needs to be fun and a good representation of how your game is. It should also leave players wanting more and excited at the end of it. I think of it as the opening sequence of a movie, like the first Indiana Jones movie. The rolling boulder scene from the prologue is something I always remember, followed by Indie being chased by all the natives. It was something that, by the end, I was excited to see what would happen in the rest of the movie. I feel like a good tutorial should, at the end, have the player excited about the game and wanting to see more of it. The key then is to actually deliver, and that your tutorial isn't a bait and switch "haha no we actually don't do that". Which, sadly, for CoH, we didn't fight many giant monsters like the giant shivan.

As I've said in many of my other posts, these are just theories of mine that I'm constantly working on. Making a good tutorial takes a lot of skill and knowledge; making a good tutorial for a free to play game is even harder, in my opinion. I'm looking forward to playing more tutorials of more games, free to play and regular, to see the various ideas that people have thrown up, as if to say, "here's what I think a good tutorial is" and seeing what sticks and doesn't stick.