Tutorials

Whenever a new player first encounters a game they have never played before, there is a certain initial hurdle to overcome. If the learning curve hits you like a wall, or you are just unable to adjust to the control scheme (or adjust the key mapping to your preferences), there is a chance you might just bounce off the game. Especially if you’re just checking it out, and are still undecided/uncommmitted as to whether you want to actually play it.

If you have already spent $70 at that point to purchase the game, or feel invested in the game for any other reason, then you might still overcome hurdles you otherwise wouldn’t - like for example in the case of a free-to-play game. Either way, generally speaking the greater the hurdle, the more players will bounce off right at the start. The easier the game is to get into first, the more time the players have to build up commitment and attachment to the game, which makes them more likely to then overcome later hurdles and challenges further down the line.

No game is for everyone, so some people will still bounce off anyway, no matter what. Because they simply don’t like the gameplay, and/or the game is not what they were looking for. That’s just down to personal perference. But any game should absolutely strife to not loose people to starter hurdles, who would love and enjoy the game if they only had a chance to get into it first. Therefore it is important to help people find the game fun during those very crucial first moments, especially when they are still undecided and not committed to the game.

And always remember: fun equals learning - the fun in games originates in figuring out the mechanics, understanding how things work, and mastering the systems presented to you. Don’t take that experience away from the player, and turn it into a classroom experience of frontal teaching. I know that’s how most school systems work, but you really don’t have to study motivation theory to grasp that this is psychologically the near worst possible method of teaching anything.

The Dark Souls Effect

To get this out of the way right away: Dark Souls (as well as similar games) does have to build that player commitment just like any other game does. Of course it does take your money to purchase it first, which - as already mentioned above - does build some commmitment, but there is another trick that Dark Souls uses, which is way more effective: It advertises itself as being a hard-as-nails punishing challenge. This locks in a very specific target audience: The kind of player who reacts to that with: “Challenge accepted!”.

This is an incredibly powerful way of creating commitment and determination in players - but it’s only suitable to a very specific target audience. Dark Souls succeeds at creating hard but overcomeable challenge where the player can easily learn through failure (because the game provides great feedback) and then return more capable. Instead of bouncing off, players become even more determined to overcome that challenge. At least those who are the target audience do. This approach does not translate well to other audiences though.

And despite what you might think, Dark Souls (afaik) is not completely without tutorial. It does not have any obvious or overt tutorial - but the very first boss fight you run into is still very specifically and intentionally designed to teach you the basics: how to learn to overcome a boss. How to read their attacks and respond to them.

How Much Tutorial Do You Want?

The golden rule of thumb is to have as little tutorial as you can possibly get away with. Keep it to the bare minimum, just what’s actually needed. That’s of course a lot easier said then done - because the wider and more diverse your target audience is, the greater the player-to-player difference becomes, in what is needed. That gap quickly becomes so wide, that a tutorial that’s still far to little for some players, is already a boring slog for others.

But that’s where the second rule of thumb comes in: trust your players, trust their intelligence. Do not create a tutorial that wastes everyone’s time and insults their intelligence. Especially not a mandatory, unskippable one. Because if you do that, then you are not showing the player the fun and making them stick around and commit - instead you are just creating an additional hurdle that will just bounce off undecided/uncommitted players. If players quit your game during the tutorial, you are failing hard. Your tutorial then is achieving exactly the opposite of what it’s supposed to do: it’s making players bounce off the game earlier, rather than later. At that point, you are just better off not having any tutorial at all.

There are always some players who will say, they don’t want any tutorial or handholding or beginner experience at all. And while I definitely do believe that this type of player does truly exist, I’m also pretty sure that at least some people claiming this, might be confusing “no tutorial” with a “hidden/invisble tutorial”, thus maybe inflating the perceived numbers of players who truly prefer nothing at all. Either way, they are probably not representative of the wider audience of most games, and thus offering some (maybe optional) help to ease new players in (without getting in the way of those who don’t want it) is advisable. You definitely don’t want a front-loaded tutorial that the “no-tutorial” players just skip or rush through, and then later cannot get back to, when they notice they might have missed something. Would be better to (optionally) offer the help to players at that point in time, when they want/need it.

Controls

The NES controller (which is what I started playing games with) has just one D-pad and two buttons and that’s easy enough to figure out (even for a kid) so that no tutorial is required at all. That button layout is a bit too limiting for many games, and it’s fine to have more buttons than that - but I feel that modern controllers might actually be overdoing it.

For example: a racing game could have zero buttons for shifting (fully automatic), have one button for shifting up, one for shifting down (paddle-shifter), or offer 8 individual, dedicated buttons (6 gears, neutral + reverse). A hardcore racing sim might offer both the latter options - but any more arcadey racer should probably by default opt for the zero-button automatic approach. In most cases you can design a perfectly fun and exciting racing game, without ever forcing the player to manually shift at all. If a game actually needs all the buttons available on a Steam Deck - then it might be time to consider if there isn’t some potential convenience feature (similar to an automatic gearbox) that could be added to the game, to reduce the number of required buttons.

Games like Diablo and Diablo 2 did use a number of keyboard shortcuts what are very useful - but when playing casually, or as a brand-new player doing their first steps in the game, it’s perfectly fine to play one-handed, using nothing but a bare-bones 2-button mouse. The keyboard shortcuts are optional - and that’s the hallmark of great UX design. It’s super easy to pick up - but does offer more advanced features that are fully optional. And the game absolutely does not loose in depth or complexity at all, just because the controls are simplified like that. You absolutely can have great gameplay complexity and depth without needing complex controls and inputs. In fact, I think it’s way more elegant to offer that game depth without having to rely on complex controls at all.

And if your basic game controls are easy to pick up like that, they shouldn’t need a tutorial at all. Controls like WASD for movement (including optional key rebinding for left-handed players, etc.) are such a widespread standard today, that they don’t need any teaching or tutorialing. (And if someone is not familiar with WASD, then having a tutorial that tests their ability to use WASD is just an unneccesary hurdle - not a help to ease them in).

I personally think, that if your tutorial is teaching the player individual key-binds, then you’re already doing it wrong. There’s only one single key that the tutorial should teach: F1, or whatever key they have to press to bring up a little graphic that shows all the current key-binds. If your game uses more inputs than a NES-controller has, or than a 2-button mouse offers, do not expect your player to learn all of those by heart in a pre-loaded tutorial. They aren’t gonna use all these buttons frequently enough to remember each single one right away. And the only button they need to remember, is F1 - so that they later know where they can look back up which button does what exactly. Teach the player how to help themselves.

And for gods sake do not force the player to go through some sort of agility course, if many players might later choose to play a class or profession or gameplay style/option that never even needs movement like that anyway. You are again only introducing an additional hurdle that bounces off players right then and there for no reason. You are gating access to the game behind a test, which tests for things that are potentially unrelevant to that specific player.

When To Do A Tutorial

Generally speaking it is considered best practice to create a tutorial for your gameplay, as soon as said gameplay exists. Unless you are creating an educational game, you wouldn’t want to start with the tutorial. You definitely want to design and implement your gameplay first - so that you actually know what to create a tutorial for.

But after that you do want to start work on your tutorial as soon as possible - because doing so (and testing it) will show you pain points and issues with your gameplay, and help you refine it. Therefore it is considered best practice to further evolve your tutorial together with your gameplay. This does come of course at the cost of having to rework and redo a lot of stuff over and over again. This kind of iterative approach maybe isn’t the most efficient - but it promises the best overall results.

You do definitely not want to develop your tutorial at the very end - after the game has been mostly finalized already. At that point, any issues or pain points you discover might come from gameplay that’s already set in stone and can’t be fixed. Also tutorials done that late always do feel tacked-on and artificial.

Ideally you want to integrate your tutorial into the regular game - and make it mostly invisible to the player. You want to open up the game slowly and over time, and unlock more and more features as the player progresses - instead of hitting the player over the head with everything all at once. You don’t want a front-loaded classroom experience, but rather make learning the game a part of the fun of slowly mastering the game. If done just right, your player shouldn’t even notice there is a tutorial.

Portal (the first one) is basically it’s own tutorial all the way through, until the very final level. Each level either introduces a new item or ability - or requires the player to figure out a new trick, a new way of applying their existing abilities. The act of learning the game is the main source of fun throughout the entire game.

The Anno series of games mostly uses it campaign mode to teach you. You start with just one single island and then get a series of missions that make you setup a basic economy with the first tier of buildings. It will occasionally restart you at a new island or place - giving you a well-working and cleaned up version of lower-tier economy build up that you’ve already built yourself more than once. And then asking to you to build on top of that and advance it further into higher tiers. Eventually you’ll get access to ships and missions to trade with other nations and to settle a second island (where you repeat the basic low-tier economy once more, only to get access to some specific resource needed to further advance your main island). None of that feels much like a tutorial, since it is cleverly disguised as your main story quest, driven by various factions and NPCs.

The Problem With Frontloaded Classroom Tutorials

Players are eager to jump into the game proper, and if your tutorial is an obvious one - then many will feel bored by it, before it even has started. That’s just conditioned reflex we all carry in us from other games. As soon as we see a pop-up trying to explain to us how to use WASD and a mouse, we automatically think: “I know that, this is for idiots only - skip, skip, skip - I want to play.”

You can’t expect players to treat your tutorial with respect - if your tutorial does not treat the players, their time and their intelligence with respect. There is a very good reason why players want to just quickly skip through it all: because you’re wasting their time and/or treating them like morons. Instead of letting them just play and then being there for them and helping them when they need it - you are forcing them through a classroom experience and gating access to the game behind a test that feels like it was designed for the lowest common denominator anyway.

And that’s why you don’t want a front-loaded tutorial that a player is forced to go through first, before being allowed into the game proper. Instead you want to integrate as much of your game learning help into the actual game proper, hidden or disguised as part of regular gameplay, offered optionally when the player needs help - rather than turned into an entrance exam that weeds out those who fail to make it through. After all, the goal is to get the player into the game, and into the fun as quick as possible - so they can start building that attachment that helps them overcome later hurdles.

The Perfect Tutorial

From all we’ve gone through above, we now can summarize, that the perfect tutorial:

• is as little tutorial as possible
• does help remove/overcome hurdles, not pose hurdles
• treats the player, their time and intelligence with respect
• teaches the player to help themselves, and how to figure things out by themselves
• integrates learning the ropes into the fun of mastering the game as much as possible
• does not feel separate from the game, is not frontloaded and especially does not gate access to the game
• keeps everything optional that not every player might need
• is spread out throughout the game and offered when the play needs it, not ahead of time
• is almost invisible to player, due to seamless it is part of the game
• should be developed very soon after developing the gameplay and then tutorial and gameplay should evolve together, iteratively
• is used as an early development tool to discover pain points and gameplay areas that need improvement
• during development is used as an indicator for when controls need to be simplified and made more convenient

The tutorial should absolutely get the player into the fun sooner - and never delay access to the fun part.

In Conclusion

If you don’t want initial (pre-commitment) hurdles to drive away players who’d otherwise love your game - then you best do not hit your players over the head with an overwhelming learning curve right out of the gate. Instead you ease them in, offer help, and slowly open up the game over time (delaying hurdles until later) - in order to help them find their footing and grow attachment, before they ever jump into the deep end.

If you feel the need to front-load your tutorial, your game probably does have way too steep an initial learning curve, and you should fix that, instead of frontloading the tutorial. A frontloaded tutorial most often only becomes an additional hurdle - instead of helping players get to the fun quicker.

Players might say they want no tutorial - but I think while some might truly like being hit over the head with the full complexity right away, most who say that probably mean that they want that inivisible kind of “tutorial”, where the game opens up more slowly and introduces it’s features one of the other - integrating the learning part into regular gameplay.