Comments on: Manuals, not tutorials

Comment on Manuals, not tutorials by: Alireza Yarmohamadi

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:55:06 +0000

A good way is:

to have 2 type of how to play:
1- tutorial, player know how to can play, how to do in the game and how to start this game.

2- Manual (Help, Guide or etc…), Hardcore Players go to find more and more details of a game.

Comment on Manuals, not tutorials by: TeMPOraL

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:31:19 +0000

Altar Interactive’s RTS game “Original War” has a detailed in-game help that reveals and explains much of the game’s techtree and mechanics. I enjoyed sole reading of it, and it made me even more keen on playing this game .

A good example of tutorial+manual combination is StarCraft. The tutorial covers just basic RTS mechanics (movement, attack, role of some buildings), while electronic help (not in-game) contains detailed information about armour and weapon classes and other stats and advanced game mechanics. StarCraft has also an in-game help covering controls in detail (shortcuts, etc.) and a paper manual, covering story and units .

Now the examples here are not exactly casual but the same rule applies. ‘Qualities’ to tutorials - how to play, what’s it all about; ‘quantities’ like statistics - to manual / in-game help. It’s also important to make player at lest little aware of the fact that those manuals actualy exist (finding StarCraft help files took me a lot of being-bored-and-had-nothing-else-to-do time).

Comment on Manuals, not tutorials by: Archbob

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 06:25:18 +0000

I never read the tutorials, its much easier and more fun to go figure out the game yourself. Usually the easy mode on a game has tips built in every now and then.

Comment on Manuals, not tutorials by: Björn

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 22:35:53 +0000

Come on, that is complete nonsense, unless you target the control freak gamers who enjoy complicated games. You have a point with the annoying tutorials, but please don’t require a manual for modern games.

Comment on Manuals, not tutorials by: Deceth

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:52:28 +0000

Yeah, teaching players how to play the game is an important part of getting them to keep playing. If it’s too complicated right off the bat, people will drop it.

You need to design the game so the learning curve is gradual not steep and in such a way that complexity is fun to learn, not frustrating. Of course, saying that and then programming can be a whole other story

Comment on Manuals, not tutorials by: How to teach player how to play your Flash game : Emanuele Feronato - italian geek and PROgrammer

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:30:50 +0000

[…] There are some interesting thoughts in Casual Game Design blog: Civilization is quite a complex game, but it’s still not hard to pick it up and play, even if you only fully understand its inner workings much later […]

Comment on Manuals, not tutorials by: Yehuda Berlinger

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 10:14:48 +0000

On a similar topic, I remember endless games of Nethack without a clue as to how to play. And I never reached the end.

Nowadays we have millions of dollars spent on games like Halo 3, where teams of researchers monitor how many seconds it takes players to figure out how to pass an obstacle or accomplish a task, and then redesign the game if it takes too long.

You’re talking more about discovering the rules, while I’m talking about discovering the gameplay, but they amount to the same thing. Everyone wants to dumb down everything in order to appeal to the mass market. The joy of discovery is not attractive. Only the power to overawe with graphics.

Yehuda

Comment on Manuals, not tutorials by: chettinger

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:06:49 +0000

New to the site, found it through your posts about the base game engine in July of 05. Anyway, on this topics I had to add that I found the introduction / tutorial for Super Paper Mario to be my worst tutorial experience to date. The shear amount of dialog that you had wade through, injected with just a few and brief moments of actually controlling Mario between more lengthy instructions was very tiring. I believe it took nearly an hour before you were free to run the levels of the game without further conversation road blocks.

On the other hand I enjoyed the tutorial method in both EVE Online and the more recent Bioshock.

EVE started you in the game with full control of your interface but provided you with a tutorial assistant. The instruction was easily skipped if you had been through it before. Easily restarted if you needed look back for information, even modular so you could jump to the section in question. The overall tutorial was brief giving you the basic instruction of flying your ship and the basics of star bases. Education then continued during your early experience with the game as necessary, when you encountered a new feature.

In contrast this was one short coming I felt for Everquest 2 and to some extend Guild Wars. Their tutorials were set on Noobie islands/zones and were rather lengthy dialog and covered the real basics.

Bioshock employed the NPC on the short wave radio educating you about your environment as you approached new areas.

To wrap this up, I like the idea of providing more of a reference manual, with abbreviated basics. Perhaps providing those as part of game play, or like more games are doing launching the documentation in the browser.

Comment on Manuals, not tutorials by: eddies

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 22:33:59 +0000

i am quite happy that you have talked on this topic because recently i have played a game called prince of persia revelation on psp …hopes that every one is
familiar with the tittle …i must say they game is insanley hard there arent much help or hint for the game that how to go through the level….but there are load of tutorial …though i have now completed the game but at on some point of the games i was so frustrated because of no clue where to go…now adays developers arent making user friendly games …thats why newbie gamers arent happy with recent new games ..

regards eddies
www.naturalgames.com