Devlog #10- The Tutorial

Hello again.
A week spent in Melbourne for PAX and then a week spent sick in bed from PAX meant I unfortunately missed a couple of weeks, but I’m now only moderately sick and ready to get back to weekly devlogs!

I haven’t made any significant progress on my game for a while now, being away from my computer and then forcing myself not to burn out by attempting to code with sick brain. I played a tonne of indie games at PAX and it got me reevaluating the value of my game (for the most part, in a positive way), and thinking about how I would show off a Nagayami Nights Demo at an expo.

So this devlog I’m gonna stick to what’s been on my mind, and talk about the dreaded tutorial and the opening to the game I have so far.

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"Shutup and let me play already"

I’m pretty confident in my ability to create interesting characters and stories, but when it comes to the writing itself, that confidence disappears. The opening of the game has a necessary fat stack of dialogue (it is an RPG after all) but I feel the need to get it as concise and polished as possible because I know the opening of a game is the most important point to hook a player.

The only gamedev I’ve done so far while sick is go in and delete as much dialogue as possible in the opening scenes of the game-
If it’s not telling the player something they need to know, or introducing a character’s personality then I scrapped it. Even important information that could be explained later on is gone now. But it still doesn't feel like enough. It might just be the lack of polish and sounds though.

On the other hand, the best part is that once players are past the tutorial there really isn’t much left that needs to be shoved down the player's throat. The world opens up and you are free to go wherever and everything can be learnt as it's introduced, mostly through player self-discovery.
The difficulty is making sure players stay through the tutorial to get to that point..

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Tutorial

My general strategy for tutorials has always been to explain necessities and let the player figure the rest out as they go. I’m sure this will backfire horribly when I get to playtesting, but we’ll figure that out when we get to it.

As of now my tutorial takes place entirely in-world; Characters introduce and explain how the game works, other than some floating button prompts. I am planning to add a glossary of tips in the options menu as a backup though.

I played through the tutorial/opening of my game at a leisurely pace today and recorded the time and it took about 33 minutes to get through. That seems like a long time, but like I said it’s more than just a tutorial. It includes the introduction to the story, world and 3 important characters (+siblings), as well as 2 hands-on battles explaining almost everything you’ll need to know through the entire game.

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"It gets good eventually"

Having to hold a player's attention for 30 minutes through tutorials makes me nervous, but playing Xenoblade 3 recently has given me some persepective- it has an insane amount of tutorials yet I’m still playing. I think the reason is because there is enough promise of a good game to come (...and I already paid for it).

There are two things I’ve specifically added to the tutorial to try and accomplish this feeling of good-to-come:

   1. The area you spend the tutorial in is filled with junk and weeds, obvious to anyone that’s played a game before that you’ll be able to clear it out eventually (and extra bonus you get to as soon as you finish the tutorial). Also there are multiple room exits (mostly blocked off), hinting at a non-linear overworld with branching paths.

   2. I make sure the player has to open the character menu and see the locked traits and upgrade trees. Also the character selector in this menu is a list, hinting at the fact there will be unlockable characters.

Losing some players in the early moments of your game is pretty inevitable, but I hope this is enough to keep people that will like my game to stick around long enough to like it. 

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In-person Demo

So does the opening of my game suit a demo booth at an expo? No, not really.
Fundamentally a single player RPG doesn’t suit a short demo, but the minigame combat, open world and fast levelling in my game give me some wiggle room.

I've decided if I were to have a demo booth, then I would simply add two options to the menu/idle screen:

Play the opening (~30 minutes)      <>    Throw me in the middle!

I would laminate the controls (controller version) and have it on the booth, then because devs usually spend most of their time at their booth anyway, if anything goes over a players head then I can jump in pretty easily to help. If a player is up for the half hour intro then they can too.

So going forward, this is now my main goal- getting to the stage where I can have a demo version ready for either an in-person booth or a steam next-fest style demo (whether I join either is undecided as of yet).

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This was my 10^th devlog, and other than being sick I’m happy with how consistent I’ve been. Back to normal schedule from now, hopefully by the 20^th devlog I’ll have that polished demo version ready to go!

Thank you for reading! See you next week for some actual tangible progress :)

PS. bonus image of smiling siblings because wall of text is boring->