The hardest part of game development? tutorials. ugh.

Tutorials are hard

One might think that it takes a long time to write the code, do graphic design, design the levels, create good game mechanics, find all the bugs in everything. And you wouldn’t be wrong. All those do take a long time.

But man, getting the tutorials right (in Frustration Factory specifically) so that everyone you run them by understands them and can follow them is very challenging. Everyone reads things and looks at things in a different way. I had some play testers point out every missing comma in the instructions, others that didn’t realize a tutorial was “just a demo to watch”, and of course the ones that didn’t actually read the page and just clicked next (and were subsequently lost when the level started).

My resulting process

1. Get opinions from many play testers.
2. Rework things based on their feedback
3. Get more opinions from the same play testers and new ones
4. Go back to 2. Repeat forever.

Elements I added.

Originally I had mostly text in the early days. No one reads that. Actually, is anyone reading this???

Then I added a static graphical screen with a diagram and some arrows showing where the moving pieces in the actual game would go. That confused people still but was better.

Then I added real level mechanics to the tutorial so it was the exact same code in a much simplified mini-level with automatic fake clicks that were passed to the code. The advantage of this is that the tutorials became functionally a test suite in themselves!. Bonus!

Finally, when people still thought the screen was the start of a level and they should be clicking, I added mouse animations showing a fake mouse clicking on things. That’s where things stand today. I’m no longer naive enough to think I’m done though.

I will say, however, that what’s there today has gotten a lot more positive feedback. I should probably go find some new play testers as well, else I’m not doing step 3 properly above. (If you’re interested, say so below and I’ll send the first few people a copy as a reward for even reading this far :-)