So right now the gaming industry has just
a bit of a learning problem and I’ll explain it in two quick examples. If I wanted to read Harry Potter, but I didn’t
know how to read. I’d have to learn about letters, words,
and 10,000 grammar rules before I could read the first sentence.I could walk into a Barnes
and Nobles and find countless phonics books made for teaching people like me how to read. I could read them, get educated, and then
I’d be literate in the English language. Now I can read Harry Potter. However, If I wanted to learn how to play
Breath of the Wild, but I didn’t know how to play video games. I’d have to learn about health, damage,
saving, interacting and so on. So I could walk into a Gamestop and ask “Excuse
me- Excuse me, sir. How can I read video games?” “Well I’ve got this copy of Battletoads” In this scenario, I can’t become literate
in what I want to learn because unlike the publishing industry the gaming industry doesn’t
seem to have any “phonics-book style” video games that teach new players all these
different concepts. So, I decided to make a free “phonics-book
style” video game, and with it I taught 6 people, who haven’t played any video games
outside of Pac-Man and Mario Kart, how to properly move, shoot, and jump in a first-person
shooter all in about 10 minutes, and as the title suggests I’m here to teach you how
you can do the same. I’ll talk about how to set everything up
for a new player, since a normal controller might be a little difficult to use. I’ll talk about what each section of my
program is is supposed to teach your player. So if anything goes wrong, you’ll know how
to guide them to learn any necessary concepts they might otherwise miss. I’m Etra from Etra Games I make videos about
Game Design when life allows me to and before we start talking about my fancy-schmancy program. I need to talk a bit more about what video
games and phonics books have in common. Phonics Books teach new readers concepts like
letters and words one at a time, at a pace that isn’t too boring or frustrating keeping
them in this nice little area, that psychologists call “a state of FLOW”, and being in this
state of FLOW helps keep the reader engaged with their material. In this “Phonics-book like” video game,
we want to use the same idea to help teach the new player how to look around, interact,
walk, strafe, dash, shoot, and jump at a pace that won’t overwhelm or bore our them. But before you even download and boot up the
game, we need to do something to help with the fact that your new player has probably
never held a controller before. In this case, our “controller” will be
a mouse and keyboard, but just like any new controller, in between every single button
press, our new player has to constantly scan their keys for the right buttons to press
over and over again before they get used to playing. In a previous video, I found that if you label
your keyboard and mouse with labeling stickers like so you can greatly reduce the amount
of time it takes your player to find the right button to press. So before you start the program make sure
to label the E key, Shift, the Left mouse button, and W,A,S,D like seen here, with the
key name and the action it performs. I used these Avery Color-coding labels, that
you can buy at basically any office supplies store or in the link below. If you don’t have five bucks to spare you
can also cut the bottom of sticky notes leaving just the sticky part of the note and label
that. Or, if you have a light-up keyboard you can
just select these specific keys to be lit up. Just make sure to use something, ANYTHING,
to label your keyboard before you begin. It’s extremely difficult to keep a new player
from getting overwhelmed when teaching any video game so I highly recommend above all
else, that you label your keyboard and mouse in some way. In fact, it’s so important, I'm going to
put it as the very first thing on your brand new super-duper important things to do list! Once you have the keyboard labeled you can
start the program, and the first thing the program tries to teach the new player is how
to look around and move in a 3d space without just staring at the floor, which seems to
be an issue for any new player that tries to pick up a 3D video game, at least according
to half of my comment section. However, there is one 3D game series that
many new players can play without trouble, Mario Kart. One thing I noticed when looking for a way
to fix this staring at floor problem was that in Mario Kart players can’t look up or down. So I was like “hey how about I do that”. So the game starts with our player chained
to this wall, and just like MarioKart they can only look left and right. We’ll add looking up and down in later. Up on the screen I placed two button prompts:
one for looking around and the other for interacting, so the player can break these supports and
let the chain fall, and then the chain EXPLODES so the player clearly knows they are free. Now even though we are like five seconds into
the game there are three issues I found while testing that I can’t fix by changing anything
with the program. So grab your list of important things and
write this down. First, you will probably have to outright
tell your player how to look right even though it’s on the screen here. Because when the program says look right a
player needs to do more than just simply move their mouse to the right as the prompt implies. They have to move their mouse to the right,
pick it up, place it back in the center, then move it right again. This movement is natural for most people who
have played first-person shooter games, and I didn’t even think of its existence until
I saw my older sister try to move the mouse like this to look around. So make sure to show your player how to lift
up and reposition their mouse so they can actually get past this part. The second thing I should note is that outside
of this very specific instance with the mouse you probably shouldn’t give your player
any hints to figure out how to do stuff. Instead, you should let them figure out these
mechanical “puzzles” by themselves. For example, let them figure out that they
can interact with objects that glow. Don’t point that out to them. If someone just tells them exactly what to
do all the time the game will become boring, simple discoveries like this can help the
player stay in a state of FLOW and find the game engaging, but if they are truly stuck
you should nudge them along before they get too frustrated. Finally, on the topic of avoiding frustration
make sure your player knows that, in order to progress in the game they only have to
do what’s on screen. Four of my six test subjects tried to break
out of the chains by walking and jumping before looking all the way to their right or left. Now, don’t worry about grabbing another
page for your list cause from here on out the game should teach them everything they
need to know. After the player frees themselves from the
chains, an arrow appears on this wall pointing left, and a prompt appears for them to walk
using W. The player should quickly learn to combine this new walking ability and what
they learned about turning to walk forward and look left to face this door. They also should remember glowing things can
be interacted with and since they know that most doors are made to be opened and closed,
our player will press E to open the door. Next, the player walks right to demonstrate
that they can rotate 90 degrees both left and right with the camera. These stairs and then this fall show the player
they can move up and down in this game with the help of stairs or gravity. The player should reach a dead end but will
see light coming from behind them. This gives them a hint that they need to turn
around a complete 180 degrees. It took around 10 seconds for each of the
test subjects to figure out what to do here, but since they discovered the fact that they
can turn around by themselves instead of it just being told to them seemed to make them
remember this mechanic a bit better for a later section. Next, the player presses these buttons with
E, which they are at eye level with to open these new metal doors. Turning 90 degrees each time gets the player
a bit more used to rotating their character on the x-axis and walking forward. Once they walk through this door, the new
player won’t be able to look left or right but only up and down. In this area, prompts for strafing also appear
and the player tests out the new concept with these walls right here. Finally, we have two buttons that open this
door, which force your player to use strafing then looking up, and strafing then looking
down to proceed. Once they exit this area, they are set in
a more open room where they can look freely in any direction. And, surprisingly, from what I’ve seen,
being introduced to a 3d environment one axis at a time seems to completely solve the problem
of staring at floors and running into walls. It’s a bit anticlimactic, but from this
point onward the six new players I had test the game seemed to have no major issues navigating
the 3D space. The player then tests all that they’ve learned
about the 3D space so far by pressing three buttons to open this door. One by rotating to the right looking up, another
by rotating to the left looking down, and the final button requires the player to turn
a full 180 degrees once again. Initially, that is all I had in my prototype,
but then I did testing for “How your parents can play Deltarune” and learned that the
hardest thing for a new player in that game was learning how to press multiple buttons
at once. You may have had an issue with this in the
past if you have tried to teach a new player to play a platformer. Most likely their jumps looked like this with
only one button being pressed at a time. My “solution” with Deltarune was to just
force the players to learn how to use multiple inputs through 7 painful minutes of brute-forcing
this button puzzle, but the action of pressing multiple buttons at once didn’t seem to
stick with the two people I had play Deltarune. It was especially concerning to me that they
would always walk everywhere since dashing was too difficult for them. Because of this, I decided to expand the prototype
to teach the player how to use multiple buttons at once since it is essential for many things
in a first-person shooter. Notably jumping and dashing. Also, a friend of mine pointed out that I
should probably add a gun. Sooooo I started a live stream called “finishing
a game for your parents or dying lol” and the first thing I did was go back to when
the player could only move forward, strafe, and look up and down and I added a treadmill
to this hallway. With no way to turn around and nowhere to
go but forward it forced my second group of test subjects to use the new dash button in
combination with W to get to the next door. They proceeded through the game as normal,
but when they get to the flower field you’ll see I ever so slightly altered what was here
before. I wanted to encourage the new player to dash
without necessarily needing to, so I placed their next objective, grabbing the gun, ALLLLL
the way at the end of this field. I then placed a treadmill on this bridge to
remind the new players. “Hey, you can run!” This reminder seemed to have helped my second
wave of test subjects because three of them held down the dash and run buttons from this
point to get to the gun, and the other two started dashing to their objective almost
immediately after getting off the treadmill. After practicing how to use several inputs
with dashing, the new player grabs the gun and simply points and clicks these two giant
targets to lower this drawbridge. They cross it to find (*MENACING MUSIC*) BIG
STAIRS. Yes, with the dual input skills they have
gathered, they must jump, a formerly painful trial for any new player. In the beginning, the player is in a safe
environment where all they have to do is press W and the space bar to get up. Next, they have to make two small jumps over
the unloving abyss and then combine their two inputs with a dash to make this long jump
here. After that, the player encounters the final
test of their abilities. First, they shoot these scattered targets
to lower this drawbridge, only to find that life is cruel. the bridge is far away AND has a treadmill
on it that leads to death. So our player must walk forward, dash, and
jump at the same time with correct timing to make it to the treadmill, but they’re
still not safe yet and must continue to run so they don’t fall into the void. Once they get to the top of the treadmill
the player must use their expertly trained interaction abilities. BUT SURPRISE! The door won’t open! I made this door special and the only the
player can open it is if they start falling and recover a bit, just so the final challenge
of the game has a little bit more excitement to it. As you probably saw, they enter this small
room to get a little celebration tune and their very own victory cake. So now all you have to do is download the
game below and grab your super important things to do list, and it seems that you would be
set. However... there is one more thing I have
to mention before you start. Even if everything does amazing in this super-specific
program made for new players I can’t guarantee that they can pick up and play any first-person
shooter with ease. To put it in perspective, even though you
got your player through a phonics book, there's still a giant leap between that and something
like War and Peace. Sure our new player now knows how to look
around, walk, strafe, fall, Interact, shoot, and jump, which will most definitely make
any first-person shooter far less overwhelming, just like War and Peace would be far less
overwhelming if you knew what words and sentences were, but each video game still has MANY other
things it just expects your new player to know before playing, and their skill with
playing games most likely won’t match up to whatever game you give them no matter how
easy you think it is. So chances are, unless you modify the game
you give them in some way, they will get easily frustrated and give up. That’s why I want to keep making these “How
your Parents can Play” videos so I can learn from testing new players and, eventually,
create a full game that any new player can play and hopefully through that experience,
your player can become game literate enough to play whatever video game they want, but for now, if you are going to use this
program I would highly recommend watching this video here where I modify Portal to make
it approachable for new players. There I go over the many issues that may arise
when going through a full first-person shooter game and my best solution for each issue in
Portal. As always, thank you for watching, have a
wonderful day and I will catch you all next time!
First test you have to make is:
Tell the person how to look up and down before they touch the mouse or keyboard.
Then tell the person to take (only) the mouse and look up. If they instinctively look down, you know you have to invert the y axis.
Then without moving, so without touching the keyboard, tell the person to look around.
Then add the movement via keyboard.