Introduction

So teaching mechanics to your player can be quite tricky, you probably don’t want to be too obvious and longwinded by writing a essay on the nearest wall about all the little tidbits that the player will need to learn over the course of playing your game.

Text isn’t the best way of teaching players how and what to do, it forces them to stop before they can progress. It also makes it possible for players to miss information or get bored with the tutorial and skip it altogether. However it can be used as a failsafe way to ensure that you didn’t forget to introduce something while you’re still working on the project. Then when you’re ready you can simply replace them one by one with their own little tutorial section.

Something I found useful while researching is to pretend to be dumber than you really are. Well not dumber per say, but less experienced. Try to do the wrong thing at every turn. This helps with spotting flaws in tutorials and potential problems you might run in to in your own game. It will put you in the shoes of your least experienced players and thats the kind of mindset you want to be in when developing your tutorial, nobody is left behind!

Show, Don’t Tell

We start by making sure that the player knows the basics, jumping, moving etc, before moving on to the more challenging stuff. Movement is fairly simple, we start by giving the player full control over their movement. We can introduce a little bump in the road to force the player to find their jump button. After that we can follow up with some more challenging jumps.

Hide non-relevant stuff

A clever thing they did in Shovel Knight is that they hid the background for their tutorial. Throughout the game there’s lots of beautiful pixel art but when it comes to the tutorial, all your player’s focus should be on the task at hand and no distractions are allowed!

What have I learned?

Most good tutorials don’t stop their player from progressing if they know what to do. You only want to stop those who might be new to the game or the genre in general so they can learn the mechanic and move on.

A good example would be the Morph Ball in Super Metroid. Now if you haven’t played any metroid game, you wouldn’t know what “morph ball” means, so how do you tell the player what to do without being too heavy-handed with it?

What they did was to have a camera come to life and start making a scary noise while pointing a light towards the player. Instinctively you try to hide by tapping the down button and thus by doing so you turn into your morphball form.

What’s Coming Next?

Well my dear readers thats all for now. Next time I’ll be writing a bit about some new features such as levers and buttons aswell as some levels to try them out in!

I will also be taking a look at Cuphead’s design to seek new inspiration!

Stay tuned!