How to teach your game, without a tutorial

TUTORIALS!

Oh lord I hate them, nothing makes a game worse than jumping in and being stopped every three seconds by some acrid toned fairy, or elderly character blasting through the pavement beneath my character’s feet and screaming something along the lines of: 

‘REMEMBER HERO, PRESS A TO JUMP, THE KINGDOM RELIES ON YOU’

And that’s why this article is here, to stop things like this from ever happening again! Now, before I dive into this, I’m going to make a quick list of caveats to my game tutorial approach.

Game tutorials in the manner I described earlier are appropriate in the following circumstances:

• Grand strategy games with complex mechanics and controls.
• Introduction of mechanics that are radically different to the core game mechanics.
• Combination attacks in fighting games, because reading these SUCKS.

And with those out of the way, let’s begin!

Your main goal as a game designer is to create an experience that is meaningful and satisfactory to your player. Flow breaking tutorials are not part of that experience. I’m going to outline a couple of alternative ways to teach your player how to play your game, first we’ll go with ‘Sign-posting’.

Sign-posting

Sign-posting can be seen in games like ‘Dark Souls’ or to go further back ‘Legend of Zelda Ocarina Of Time’. It’s the practice of injecting game information and tutorial tips into in game items, like signs, items or environmental indicators. This is a brilliant way of showing a player how to play, because the initiative is on the player to find out how to play. When a player works something out for themselves, it brings a wave of satisfaction and makes the game more enjoyable.

Next is a technique without any kind of direct communication with the player, ‘learned behaviour’!

Learned Behaviour

Learned behaviour is a personal favourite of mine, this is displayed most prominently in the hit classic Megaman X. In Megaman X, you aren’t given a tutorial. No sign-posts, no character jumping on screen and pausing the game loop, nothing! Just you and the game. You bash on some buttons, work out what hurts you and what doesn’t and carry on. Now, in the initial level of this game you come into contact with an end-level boss who will wreck you. Like seriously, just smashes you silly. But at the last second, Zero arrives and bops the guy!

Now, when this happens, you will see Zero do a charge blast with his weapon. What this does (or should do), is plant the seed in the players mind that THEY can do that. With some fiddling with their controller they’ll eventually learn that they can hold down the button and do a charge blast, and satisfaction goes through the roof!

So there you go!

Avoid making loop-interrupting tutorials. In general they’re clunky, disorientating and really aren’t that exciting to work with. It’s important your player knows how to play your game but it’s doubly important that they enjoy your game. So try to make tutorials that are either interesting to play through, or not intrusive into the core of the game.

Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in more of my work or want to get connected you can follow me on twitter.

-Ash