Author: Qingyi Dou

 
There are many games that don’t have clear and playable tutorials, such as auto chess, which give me a hard time when I first play them. I can’t quickly know how to play these games and in order to continue playing, I have to search online for the game guides written by others. There are also a lot of dissatisfaction with the tutorial from other people’s evaluations. Although I noticed this, I didn’t really think about the importance of the game tutorial until I made the game myself. I made a collaborative game called Super Guardians, which requires two players to do some actions together in order to beat the monster or protect themselves form monster’s attack. However, players won’t know what they should do without the guidance of a tutorial. So when doing user testing, players needed my explanations and instructions all the time, and this also distracts them from their gaming experience a lot. So my purpose is to make an in-game tutorial. The process explores good ways to embed game tutorials into games, to make tutorials clear, and to smooth the transition between tutorials and games.
From research I learn that there are basically two types of game tutorials, one teaches players everything before the game starts, and the other teaches little by little during the game process. The latter one is more suitable for longer or more complicated games, so this one is what I need. “Super Guardians”is now made into levels and before each level begins the tutorial for this level will appear. There should be a boss level at the very end with no tutorials, this allows players to fight with the monster by themselves. Tutorial levels build the knowledge base for the players, and players have to show in the game process that they have mastered the things taught by the game in order to enter the final boss level. Besides, the tutorial includes simple animation of stick figures and small amount of text.
Tutorials can be seen as one of the most direct ways to feel a game. In recent years, the game world is developing rapidly. Statistic shows that in 2004, there are only seven games released on Steam (a well-known digital distribution platform for video games) worldwide. The number slowly grows during the next nine years, and after 2014, the number of games released on Steam increases sharply every year. By 2018, up to 9050 games were released on Steam (Statista), and these data are just the number of games released on one single platform. Therefore, if a game is to stand out from such amount of games, all aspects can not be neglected, and the tutorial is also an important part we must pay attention to. One successful game example is “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (3D)”. It is the perfect embodiment of the “bit by bit” tutorial style. Players learn different skills every time they enter a new map. Zelda and its tutorials are both very successful, and they are both examples I can learn a lot from.