Game tutorials are terrible (to program)

hello there this is Phillip and in this video I'm going to talk about tutorials and especially my games tutorial but also why I was wrong in so many ways about tutorials in the past so first of all games need tutorials it's weird because uh for most other Media or all other media types like books or movies you don't need tutorials right it's not like you go into a movie theater and they're like before you can see Batman 5 you have to watch this short video that teaches you how to watch Batman 5 no it's just like you watch it right and in some ways uh that's to be expected of course because games are something that you use right and uh it's also like games are about teaching but that's for another video maybe but anyway tutorials are are needed especially for some games the but the kind of the Holy Grail of tutorials is not to have a tutorial right to have a game that explains itself and as far as I know like the most famous example of this is a game called Metroid which I haven't played until yesterday uh but uh I mean not the original one uh so I'll I'll show it here right what what I mean by uh not having a tutorial um so this was I'm pretty sure I I heard it from several sources that like this was the first game that that really like made it uh like was pretty complex but still didn't try to teach you through like a lot of text right this is just an intro it's it's just the story right but if you start the game you immediately get thrown into this world and the thing that game designers love is that like nothing is told to you but the level itself like the game itself is made in a way that you are going to like you have to learn it even if you don't try to right so like imagine you are in this is very old game probably older than me maybe uh but but you have a console back at the time and you're like okay this is this cool thing and then you see the first picture from the game or the first screen and like okay so this is going to be a platformer right just from the looks of it so it's a known quantity platformer you also have your controller with left right and two buttons right so you try left right and oh okay so I can do this and the I nothing uh oh okay these things will hurt me and then I also have this button where I can jump cool and the other button is shooting all right so and also notice that I can go to both directions so like from the start I have a um an idea of being like having Freedom right all right so I go this way and immediately it's like okay there's this thing that I that I can't fit through even if I um press my down arrow but okay I can jump this High all right so it teaches me about jumping and then there's this thing oh and then there's this thing and then there's you can't hear it but there's like a different music things stopped and I learned that okay cool something happened but I don't know what I can't go this way suddenly when I jumping I I'm rotating like this which is weird and also I can get here see it's like oh okay and so then sooner or later I realize okay so maybe I it didn't do anything when I pressed down but now oh I get into like a ball cool and so that's that's how it goes right then uh okay then you die so anyway so this is this is Metroid and uh the the way that they were able to do this is first of all they they did another platformer Platformers were known at the time so it's it's fine but second of all they also only had you know this this one controller uh and also they but they had very clever level design right so I thought for my game that I would have something similar I would have like this level at the start which would be completely open everyone could do whatever they wanted right and then uh but it would have this uh this trainer unit I'm going to um show you so like this trainer unit at the start which tell them what to do right and uh then they would just follow its orders and uh they would have a great time learning but also they would have all the flexibility in the world right like they could go anywhere uh they could just um yeah go somewhere else so this actually worked well for about like half of the people that I tested the game with people were like this wasn't here the the clicker wasn't here right uh so just by following the advice of this of this other robot which is here right now and you're supposed to go after it um just by following this advice they were able to complete the tutorial mostly like often died at the very end my fault but uh but they they had a blast right but then the other half of people just started doing things that I didn't expect they would be doing and or they were very like they didn't want to read you know uh and so they immediately had a very bad experience and so I wanted to fix this so this past week I did a lot of improvements I think it's improvements to the game so that um people are able to actually complete a tutorial and hopefully still have fun playing it right so I'll show you what what happened to the people first I want to show you what happened to the other half of the people who didn't uh do anything so you you could do anything from the start right so people started the the better case scenario is that the people started just like moving around with their robot right and they also started like reading a bunch of stuff here and here and and they were like okay so what does this do you know and then they completely like forgot about this guy going around and then they were like what what what's now what now right so that's one thing the worst uh thing was that they were able to literally shoot themselves in the food uh but no in in actual in actuality right so just by looking at this game this is not like Metroid uh because just by looking at this game you don't know what exactly it is right is it clicking that you're supposed to do is it going to be like you have to select something and then click is it going to be like a real time strategy or is it a more action-y game where you are going to uh use wsad um cursor to to move right and so a lot of people tried that and the first thing that you tried is W but in this game and as in many other action RPG games even though this is not necessarily action RPG but in many games W does something right because it's right there for your uh left hand so w in my case just launches grenades right so they would be like what's what's going on what what is this uh that's still the better scenario the worst scenario was the grenades are thrown or like the missiles uh go to where your mouse is currently right and so like they would have their Mouse over their own uh robot and then they would press W and then it would be like what they would just either kill themselves or basically kill themselves like I just did now right so so I didn't know what to do with this uh right so like like the only solution that I came up with was just basically like I forbid I you can't do the the first 5 seconds or or so you can't actually do anything uh I mean I I just turned it off because I wanted to show you how that works but if I tried to do it in a nor in the normal game then it would not uh do anything and so people would be like oh okay so po possibly I need to uh actually read this guy right and now and then I added the callouts right so this is not strictly necessary right now but it will come in handy I'll I'll show so now you start going around and you have this uh double click to Dash is not shown with the yellow thing so you kind of have to read but it's not that important and then another thing was Jonah had left click to scan all right so that worked actually although some people did not see the Drone uh so I just put a huge Arrow here and another thing that is kind of like a brain fart for people was that it said left click to scan but a lot of people right clicked it which is a completely different thing that you will see a bit later right but you left click to scan it starts scanning blah blah blah I also a new Improvement to the tutorial is that uh the Drone this drone is unarmed which will also come in handy but anyway and now it says left click it again and hack before it said this I'm I'm just like going through very small things so so that you understand how how painful it is to to find all these like little details that people could go wrong with right so in this case uh it said left click uh it again for a context menu because I want to teach people that this is not just a game where you just shoot around that you have a context menu for everything that you see including Amos and or you know or you but that will not there yet U and that it's it's a deep game right so uh so that was what it said but people clicked and then Amos says heck the drones if system now right but because it's said so here and people were like oh cool they immediately started to aim right or just just some some of them started to to hack but like most of them will would be just like oh cool and and they started aiming which is not what I wanted to teach them right so okay so I was um I'm going to do what it says hack I have system the thing that Amos said before you know uh click and hack so I hack the ifs system and now it teaches me right click on drone to aim right and thankfully it's also shown and another thing people and I don't blame them because uh the in the previous version of the game that thing was started shooting in them because you change the identify friend of four mechanic in the or like the the chip in that drone and the Drone was armed so what it immediately started shooting at you right so they were immediately under intense pressure and something here told them right click on drone to aim and they started left clicking not all of them but like I can totally get this that when you're under so much stress like you start you start left clicking and nothing happens right and I had to watch this as as the game developer and I was like oh my God this is terrible because they got shredded they they were like to to yeah they they were done for basically so anyway so I that this is was the main reason why I started uh showing the actual like this hopefully even if you don't read this you know what to do right and you start aiming and then uh it also tells you which it didn't before you can move uh you can move although I'm not sure if I if people will actually hear that or see that you are equipped with uh with a thing and here it's just like me showing you the uh the the thing that they should be shooting at um and I think no no no actually and then then we go elsewhere here yeah replenish ammo I haven't um implemented yet and and then you have slow time which was there before but people just kept kept pressing the slow button which made it go into and out of slow time like every frame which was really weird so people just stopped I mean that there like people learn but it it felt wrong so uh there's now a debounce and then uh it says okay left click s and deploy turret uh and after that uh what's going on here oh okay something's wrong H and then uh this happens where it's like uh some drones start shooting at you and this is where I'll stop but but before that the one of the drones just kept being in [Music] the in the the forest here right and and that made him invisible to you and so a lot of people just s saw the forest shooting at them and they didn't yet realize what that means right uh so I just said okay you know what they'll learn about concealment sooner or later so I'll just like show them how the draw drone goes out of the forest and then they'll start shooting right and then I'm not going to spoil the end of the tutorial but but uh that's it that's that's how that's how it works now so so yeah so that that's the tutorial I think it's like I was wrong because I thought how cool it will be that uh that the tutorial is so open-ended but half of the people had a terrible time with this and so that kind of tells you something about how that's not that was not a good approach and how you know in theory of course things like that work but then in practice you realize they don't anyway now that I have a tutorial I think I am more ready to have some kind of like Alpha Testing because some some downloadable thing that I can put somewhere um and so that people can try the game so fingers crossed and uh see you next time cheers

Channel: Filip Hráček

Views: 2,179

Keywords: gamdev

Id: Y74oJKo2WRI

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2023