How I Got My Mom to Play Through Plants vs. Zombies

[Music] okay so today I'm going to talk to you about how I got my mom to play through plants vs. zombies and Who am I I'm George fan I like my steak well-done and my magic cards rare and I'm the creator of plants vs. zombies thanks so this is my mom she's a non gamer in fact I think the only game she might have beaten is plants vs. zombies her favorite food is lettuce I once asked my mom hey mom what's your favorite food and she said lettuce and I said really you could choose any food in the world and you pick lettuce she said yes so that's my mom and and she's destroyed quite a fair share of zombies in her lifetime because as you know you kind of have to do that to get through plants vs. zombies which is awesome

because prior to playing pvz my mom's idea of what zombies was was totally different from everyone else's you see before my mom started playing pastures of zombies she was watching my dad play and at some point she apparently asked my dad why are you killing old men so I don't know I just I just really liked that for a moment my mom thought that her son had made a game about killing old men and in case there's any confusion whatsoever plants vs. zombies is not a game about killing old men so anyway how did I turn my mom into a zombie destroyer there were many things that contributed to my mom's beating of plants vs. zombies you got strategy pacing you got game balance consistent rewards and unit design but if the tutorial hadn't been done well and she couldn't learn the game then all the time spent crafting the other elements of the game wouldn't have mattered in terms of getting my mom to play through so today I'm gonna focus on talking about PV Z's tutorial the other stuffs all very interesting too

but that's for perhaps another time so why did I choose this topic well as game designers everyone has something that they're passionate about or spend a lot of brain cycles on and I do think a lot about simplicity and accessibility and tutorials kind of go hand-in-hand with that so why is the tutorial important well it's because it's what gets a player into the meat of your game a player is not going to enjoy minute 30 of your game if they don't get past the first 5 and they're not going to get past the first 5 if they don't know how to play your game that's why it's so utterly important especially for games that feature new game mechanics to teach the player in an intuitive and enjoyable way I spent an enormous amount of time thinking about how to make plants vs. zombies playable by anyone so it's and it's no small feat because as you know it's it's a strategy game at its core and it can get pretty complex so I felt like my mission was definitely accomplished when my mom who like I said barely plays any games told me that she'd been the entire thing so today I'd

like to share with you some of the techniques I come up with and give you a glimpse onto how I like to teach game mechanics to players and using my most recently designed game plants vs. zombies as a source of examples so here we go 10 tips for making your tutorials better also known as a tutorial on tutorials ok first tip you want to blend the tutorial in the game so we're gonna strive to make it not feel like a tutorial at all you see when most people think of learning they think of something like this picture which for most people isn't fine and is kind of a lot like work which is why doing something like this for your main menu which clearly separates the tutorial from the game tends to be bad do you see how unfund that second option looks you might as well put this under your main menu you might as well put this on your main menu if you're gonna say tutorial so that's why I go to great measures to make sure I don't have any sections in my game actually labeled tutorial the weird thing is games are

kind of all about learning I mean you're discovering new techniques and adapting the new challenges games stop being fun once you've figured everything out and they stop being fun once you stop learning so okay so humans like learning and learning is inherently fun but most humans don't know they like learning and that's why we must trick them we have to make the player think they're playing the game and not the tutorial there should be no indication of where the tutorial ends and where the game begins so here's an example of a bad tutorial first of all it says tutorial in big fat letters then notice the one out of six on the bottom that's six pages of info probably five of which is irrelevant at the start of the game and with this tutorial here there's there's definitely a distinction between where it the tutorial ends and where the game begins it's kind of the virtual equivalent of this remember when this is all we had to go off of and nowadays we can seamlessly blend the tutorial into the game so why don't we someone once said to me that they felt like the main mode of PVC was kind of like a really

long tutorial for the other modes in the game that's a pretty good compliment and even better compliment would be if I ask someone hey what did you think of the tutorial and pvz and the reply was that game had a tutorial I feel like it's what we should all strive for and to help you remember I created this character these tutorial chameleons to help drive the point home so let's all remember the tutorial chameleons because that's what really the overarching theme of this presentation is about which is to teach players without them even realizing they're being taught it should be noted that even though I'm advocating not having the player realize they're in a tutorial that's but still very different than not having a tutorial at all okay which brings us to number two it's better to have the player do then read instead of having the player read what they're going to do why not have them do what they're going to do the best way for the best way for the player to learn is by actually performing the actions within the game and actually playing it and plus playing the game is just so much more fun than reading about it let's take plants vs. zombies level one

here we needed to teach a few basic concepts of the player like zombies walk to the left in a straight line and peas shoot to the right in a straight line and we could have spelled it out like so and put this message put these messages on the screen but instead we wanted to let the player experience it in a safe environment like where the players could actually feel like they're already playing the game so what we did was he crafted this really basic level with just one type of plant one type of zombie the pea shooter all right one type of plant the pea shooter one type of zombie the basic zombie and just one single Lane where you could plant stuff on here all the things the player can observe are like they can observe that zombies take damage while they're playing they can observe that zombies walk in a straight line they can observe that peas shoot in a straight line and that zombies take about ten pieces to kill and they can experience this all within the first level without you know us actually putting any words on the screen so the player learns all of this by simply playing the game and we didn't have to explicitly tell them any of it

here's another example of where we wanted to have the player learn by doing hopefully you're all familiar with the shovel in pvz it lets you remove one of your plants so you can put a new one in its place and there's a lot of history behind the shovel in pvz and how we decided to implement its tutorial and I want to go through it all with you to give you an idea of how much care was placed on letting the player learn by doing here's something we didn't want to do which is just to put a message up on the screen that says you know did you know how did you know you could use the shovel to dig up plants to replace it with others because for something so early and integral in the in the game we really wanted to make sure players knew of it because a message like this like is pretty easy to miss and we wanted to make sure they knew how to use it so I began looking for a solution where the player would actually pick up the shovel and use it so this was our first attempt we knew we were giving out the shovel around level 1-5 and we also coincidentally knew we

are going to have we're going to want to have a minigame show up on level 1 - 5 so why not have the minigame teach the shovel mechanic right it's a great way to get the player to learn by doing this minigame here they placed a bunch of weeds on your lawn and then it had you use your shovel to get rid of the weeds this turned out to be not quite what we were looking for because it didn't really teach that it didn't really teach that the shovel was for getting your plants out of the way so they could get replaced instead it kind of taught the player used the shovel to get rid of harmful things and that's not that's not the message we actually wanted to get across so attempt number two was to have crazy Dave come and put walnuts all all over your lawn and that's a pretty good start for anything but the minigame itself had you using the shovel to make room for the pea shooters that would come down this conveyor belt here and while it did a good job of teaching players to use the shovel to remove stuff to make room for other plants the

the minigame itself wasn't very fun there just wasn't much strategy to it and you kind of tended to use the shovel over and over and that got old really quick so next we tried another minigame where a crazy Dave comes in and tells you he lost his squirrels and that you had to dig up walnuts to find them and this didn't get very far either like again the repeated digging was problematic and the minigame wasn't very fun but despite it containing squirrels so this is where we finally ended up while all this other stuff was going on we developed a minigame that actually was fun which was moment bowling and the problem was that walnut bowling had nothing to do with the shovel so we kind of we kind of compromised and we just simply prefaced the minigame with a quick tutorial that says hey use your you know user shovel to dig up these three peashooters on your lawn so that you can prepare for bowling and this is what we ultimately settled on because it

made you actually use the shovel it communicated that you remove plants to make room for other stuff and had a minigame that was actually enjoyable so even though minigame number two the one where you removable on us to put peashooters down even though that one might have taught the shovel mechanics slightly better we decided it was more important for the player to have a good time so the lesson here is that fun prevails yet I think the tutorial still worked well enough that everyone who played the game knew of the shovel and knew how to use it all right number three teaching spread out the teaching of game mechanics because if you if you intentionally staggered the teaching of game mechanics it's it's a really powerful tool in teaching players how to play your game and once we realize we don't have to teach everything right off the bat we can be a lot more effective at teaching I think in general it's best to think does the player really need to know this at this point and if the answer is no then you can delay the teaching of the mechanic until a later

point in the game so in the case of plants versus zombies we were actually quite conservative I feel like a lot of other games might not do this but we we introduced peripheral mechanics really slowly so the introduction of the shovel was delayed until 1-5 which is five levels into the game and we didn't introduce the concept of money until you were ten levels in this is so on level two - one is where you first see a zombie drop a coin and then for the next 15 levels you're only allowed to purchase one thing and this is all cuz like I felt like the game was engaging enough that it did we didn't need to sidetrack the players with with kind of a sudden store where you could buy a bunch of things so we only allowed you to purchase one thing which was an upgrade that lets you choose more plants at the start of the level and it's just enough to demonstrate that money in this game can buy you cool stuff and it wasn't until

3-4 that's 25 levels in where we finally opened up the store and gave you a choice of what to buy and even even at this point the store only opened up with a limited selection like like you see on the screen and we gradually introduced the rest of the items as the game went on and the most extreme example is that we we knew the Zen garden was something it was something it was a mode that you kind of would play after you beat a venture but yet we still wanted to give a player like make the players aware of and give them a taste of it so we introduced the Zen garden with a mini tutorial after level 5 - 4 that's and that's 45 levels into the game and 5 levels before the game is done and so why would we do such a crazy thing well ok so Zen garden comes with a somewhat elaborate tutorial that takes about 3 minutes to get through now just imagine if we presented that near the beginning of the game like spending 3 minutes teaching you an optional mode of the game I know if a game did that to me I would that would be the perfect time to drop out and stop playing so when I

first start playing a game there's only a certain willingness to put up with things but as the game goes on I'd be and I become more invested over time my willingness to learn actually grows and at that point you can start introducing new concepts the other advantage is by delivering messages at a relevant time their teaching effectiveness has increased so suppose you're trying to convey what a powerup does that you don't get until level 10 you know what the best time to convey that would be that would be right before you get it on level 10 and not at the beginning of the game because we learn much better if we're presented with the relevant information and are able to apply it immediately and yet another advantage is spacing out your game mechanics is it lets the player it gives the player a chance to apply what they've learned I once played a puzzle game that introduced all of its mechanics within the first few levels of the game they introduced it one by one one level after another and one mechanic after another and before I before I got to toy around

with the first mechanic they already kind of moved me on to the next one and while I'd rather have that problem than a boring game with no new mechanics I feel like I feel like that game could have been improved if it first taught you mechanic and then gave you a level or two to play with that mechanic before teaching another one so the key is to is to paste the game to introduce just enough that the game remains interesting and while not overwhelming the player so for plants vs. zombies we actually we originally shooting for one new zombie every level and we found that we found actually was more effective to space them out a bit so instead we tried one zombie every one new zombie every other level instead and the format for that is weed weed introduced the zombies on levels that would be kind of easier in that that would let you kind of learn about the zombie in a safe environment and then for the next level we kind of we kind of once you once you know how to handle the zombie weed presented again in combination with the other ones the

other zombies in a more challenging level and here's here's sort of a random tip I found I found that in game stores they can be a pretty decent way of getting information to players as well so say like you have a bunch of advanced concepts to teach like a bunch of power-ups that all do different things you can you can try sticking them in the store if your game has one because because the player player kind of goes into us thinking I have all this in game currency I spent time earning and I need to spend it in the best way possible so what they're gonna do is they're going to do some comparison shopping and they're gonna they're going to read all the store descriptions to figure out which item is the best to spend their money on that's that's that's only at the point where the player is kind of invested in your game so that's where you can kind of put some info knowing the player is likely to read it it kind of it kind of boils down again to the investment versus the willingness to learn thing but only only this time

instead of the investment being time your investment is now the in-game currency okay number four is to just get the player to do it once sometimes all you all you need to do is get the player to perform in action once once a player performs an action and sees the results of behavior it's often all it takes for the player to to get it and to understand so sometimes you can you can flash a button that you want the player to press or you can point an arrow at an appoint an important object and sometimes that's all you need to do for instance the first coin we drop in the game we put a little bouncy arrow above it to kind of draw draw your eye to it and make the players more likely to click on it here on the first level in the game we flash the seed packet like so yeah well check this out okay and it draws your eye to the seed packet and once you click it you'll notice the plant goes into your cursor and then the

grass starts flashing like this and it makes you really want to click on the grass doesn't it so now in clicking the grass I've successfully selected a seed packet put the plant down and learn one of the fundamental actions of the game and all I all I had to do was click on whatever was flashing and now I want to run you through one of the biggest design challenges we faced when making pvz so sunflowers as you know they're they're the economy and in plants vs. zombies they're kind of like the backbone of the game but the idea of an economy in a video game is not someone and it's not something that everyone understands so about halfway through the development of PVC we got a we got a couple pieces of really important feedback these these come from a pop cap employee basically pointing out that his wife not coming from a hardcore gaming background just totally didn't understand the importance of planting lots of sunflowers early instead of starting out planning a bunch of

sunflowers like this which which I do she would neglect planting sunflowers and her lawn would look something more like this and and this is fine for the early levels in the game but it's not you're not going to beat the game playing playing this way and here here a couple of more pieces of feedback that the echo the previous ones these these players had never heard the term RTS nor nor did they understand that it was important to build up your economy and at this point I realized this was the biggest flaw with our game know I set out to make a strategy game that anyone could pick up and play and now I was confronted with the daunting task of teaching the importance of economy to non-gamers and I didn't quite know how to do it and I wasn't sure if we could pull it off so I asked a bunch of people at PopCap for suggestions on how to fix this and they they came up with a bunch of good ideas to try and the first the

first was to consider making it making the resources work more like in the traditional tower-defense because the the guy the earlier guy's wife he he actually you know she played she played a few of these and had no trouble understanding understanding of the traditional tower-defense types and because in in these traditional tower defense games you automatically earn resources every time a monster is killed so as long as you're doing a good job defending you'll you'll have enough resources for more towers it's not a separate economy but this would involve one you removing sunflowers and they're they're separate akane from the game which i want i didn't want to do because i felt like i felt like that that economy was something that differentiated our game from other tower defense games and to I just felt the sunflowers too iconic a character to cut and I just I didn't right I didn't want to toss it out so the next suggestion was to add in some tutorial messages

here and there like trying to explain sunflowers on a more relatable level instead of like this kind of engineering text so for instance saying stuff like Sun is like fuel you need it to plant other plants stuff that kind of the general public could get or it could could relate to and I thought that was fine and we we did end up doing a little bit of this but I wanted to cover all fronts regarding the sunflower suggestion number three was to start out with a Calma sunflowers and I like that it gave you an indication so you would start the level you start the level with a column or two of sunflowers and and and players could kind of go off of that and I liked it because it gave me an indication of how many sunflowers you might need and it kind of reminded you to be reminded you that sunflowers are a good thing but I wasn't convinced that if we suddenly stopped giving him out at some point which we would have to do

that novice players would adapt and and and know what to do at that point so the fourth idea was to actually have some spaces on the lawn reserved for just planting sunflowers where you and you can't play anything else there and that's that's also a pretty good idea and it kind of it would kind of actually change the game a decent amount but I wanted to see if I felt like it added a bit of complexity I wanted to see if the problem was solvable without doing that so what did we end up doing I think the solution we came up with I think it turned out to be quite effective so first you have to notice that at the time both sunflowers and peashooters costed 100 son so they both costed the same amount and the other the other thing that was different at the time was we started you out with 200 son which meant at the beginning of the level at the very beginning you could plant two of any combination of a pea shooter or a sunflower and the reason for these

numbers isn't I just I just chose them because they seemed like nice round numbers and they felt they felt good in playtesting so a hardcore gamer who kind of knows what to do here they they plant a lot of sunflowers early on to build up your economy but imagine you're someone with not much gaming experience and you see both the the pea shooter and the sunflower lit up which one are you going to plant you're going to you're gonna plant the pea shooter because it seems more effective at finding out zombies the the the sunflower might seem kind of frivolous at this point and and so in planting just pea shooters you're going to end up with with a layout like this a layout with no sunflowers so what did we do it was it's pretty simple we changed the sunflower to cost 50 and we also changed the starting amount of Sun to 50 so that now when you start a level it looks like this so if you'll notice the peashooters is grayed out and there's only one option when you start the level

and it's sunflower so no matter who you are the first thing you're gonna do is likely to plant a sunflower and not a pea shooter another nice effect of costing the sunflower at 50 is that the sunflower would would tend to light up more often because when you have enough money to buy something it lights up and so when you're at 50 Sun the sunflower would be lit and not a lot of other things would and when you're at 75 Sun the the sunflower which would be still lit and so it would just light up more naturally over the course of the game and so due to it costing less players what would just naturally tend to plant more sunflowers which is what we wanted them to do and for this technique I kind of have to thank fisher-price I looked at I looked at how a preschoolers brain works which is just to press the bright shiny object and and and and it worked out in this game so I guess we never truly outgrow that instinct so this one change let us satisfy both camps we were

we were essentially forcing the first thing you planted to be a sunflower but hopefully the novice player appreciated the guidance and hopefully the hardcore player didn't feel like they were just playing on easy mode with everything pointed out to them because we made it a rule of the game like the games flow naturally favored you doing the right thing okay but we weren't we weren't done yet like in this screenshot you can see that the Sun that both both the sunflower and the walnut are lit up and since they both cost 50 and this this is still pretty early in the game and it was a situation I wanted to avoid because we went through all that trouble to to make it so the sunflower was the only thing lit up so so I was concerned that novice players might still pick the walnut here over the sunflower which would be a bad move so we tried changing the walnut to cost 75 so that it wouldn't be lit up at the beginning of the level but it just didn't feel right at that price what we ended up doing was to have the walnut start the level charging up so that the beginning of the level would look more like this so in plants versus zombies

now you'll notice that there's a few plants that start the level on on reach hard so they're actually dimmed out and we would run into the same issue with the potato mine because it costed 25 you can see that here and so we just we applied this initial recharge to all plants that had a longer a longer recharge and that and that did the trick and hopefully this didn't stick out to anyone who played the game but if you notice it that's that's the reason we did it so now for the first ten levels of the game the sunflower is the only thing highlighted at the start of the level and the solution worked but unfortunately changing something as fundamental as the sunflowers cost meant we had to rebalance and retest the entire game I don't know how many hours I spent I played through the entire game maybe like three times and and and also we slowed down to make to make the rate of Sun more equivalent to what it was before we slowed down the rate at which

the Sun popped out of the sunflowers to kind of kind of balance their newly reduce costs because it'd be kind of like like charging 25 minerals for instead of 50 for an SUV and Starcraft like it's like one numerical change like that could cause like a ripple effect that would result in dozens of hours of work so like and then they'd also have to reprice a bunch of things and rebounce the entire game so this is just to emphasize the measures we went to like in order to make the teaching of our game more straightforward okay number five is use fewer words I sort of have this rule of my games that there should be a maximum of eight words on the screen at any given moment of course this is pretty much impossible to maintain and I do break the rule from time to time but I feel like I feel like it's a good thing to shoot for and it's also important to keep your tutorial

messages low on the number of sentences so you have to figure out what needs to be said to the player and say only that so let's go through let's go through an example of a one sentence message with the four sentence message so here's here's what we did in the game we we have a nice concise statement that says click on a seed packet to pick it up and in contrast here's what we could have done we could have had a bloated four sentence tutorial message here in this first case the player is likely to read that one sentence process it and use that knowledge to play the game and in the second case how many sentences do you think the player is going to read probably not all four I think in fact I think it's more likely they're going to read zero because there's just something about our brains that when we see a big block of text like this we we tend to tune out and personally I I get that I get that to like when I see big blocks of text presented like this early in a game I tend to forward past them because we think it's either too much

work to read or we expect that there's nothing important in there so in plants vs. zombies we made our plant descriptions as short as possible I tried to think of the one sentence that I would want the player to know and just say that so for the sunflower we just said gives you an additional Sun and that's nice and short for the Cherry Bomb says blows up all zombies in an area and it that's nice and here's an example where I tried to distill a description down to just the most important sentence if you know this this fumes room you'll know that it it it does a OE damage to all zombies in a line but notice I didn't say that in the description all I said was fume it shoots fumes that can pass through screen doors because that's going to be the most important thing to know when you're facing down a hoard of screen door zombies like this so knowing about the AoE damage is actually secondary to

knowing that you can effectively take out a screen door zombie with it so when coming up with messages to say in your tutorials it might be useful to think of it a manner of speaking which I've I've dubbed the sophisticated caveman so you speak to the player in a way this guy would he's not an unsophisticated caveman he doesn't replace his eyes with Me's but he tends to get his ideas across and a few word possible so let's go through some examples shoots peas at the enemy see you can you can almost imagine him saying that blows up all zombies in an area you got the shovel and and perhaps this was easy for me to implement in PVC because it's actually not too far from my natural way of speaking I believe I believe last year at GDC I had a cheese juicy quote it was really bad and that made me really sad all right I actually said this at a talk last year and as you can see it totally

fits so whenever we had larger amounts of dialogue I found it effective to breaking into small chunks for the player that I digest one at a time crazy lave says a decent amount of stuff in pvz and we found that it was easier to read when it was broken up into little pieces that you forward it through one at a time with each click old Nintendo games did this nicely maybe maybe they did it intentionally but maybe they just had a limited number of pixels to display on the screen oh and one more thing to note about crazy Dave our initial our initial thought was we came up with this character so that he'd deliver the the tutorial in the beginning of the game and a lot of games do this they have an in-game character that delivers a tutorial to you the idea is it's more personable and it introduces the character at the same time which is hopefully entertaining but to the player so we were originally going to have him pop up in level 1 - 1 here and teach you the basics of the game the problem was he first had to

introduce himself before he even started telling you what to do and also the lines he said they all had to be infused with his crazy character and so that that actually made the tutorial less direct than I wanted it to be so ultimately we chose to delay his introduction until 5 levels into the game and keep the early tutorials really direct and concise like this it kind of goes back to this graph like when players start out playing your game you really you kind of you want to put your best foot forward and if if that best foot is your gameplay then you kind of want to get out of the way and you don't want your player to be reading a bunch of dialogue you want them to be playing your game as soon as possible and then and then once you have them invested in your game and after playing a few levels you can start peppering in more and more dialogue ok number six is to use unobtrusive messaging if possible don't break flow whenever I display a message

in the middle of game I try to I try to display it in a passive manner so that the player doesn't have to instantly stop what they're doing and read the message because I've just had I've had too many cases where I'm getting into the groove of the game and a dialog pops up and it freezes the action and it requires me to press ok kind of like this so I try not to use okay dialogues that pop up without warning unless there's something I absolutely need the player to no I prefer to present messages that are passively displayed like at the bottom of the screen here and that lets you continue playing while you read them this is a good example it's a side scroller where the words press Z to jump are written on the background wall so it actually Scrolls along the wall as you move the and the info is presented to you at a relevant time right before you need to jump right here and you can you can read it at your leisure so it doesn't break your flow and also when you when you don't need to know the info

anymore it just naturally Scrolls off the screen as you progress okay number seven is to use adaptive messaging so can any of you remember this message displaying during your playthrough a plants vs. zombies it reads one of your pea shooters has died try planting them further to the left if you don't it's probably because you were doing the right thing and didn't need to be shown this message this message is only shown to players who lose a peashooter in one of the early levels and only if that peashooter was planted in one of the right most columns so by watching some one player game you can kind of get an idea of the messages you might need to display the the plant your pea shooters to the left message that originated when we we can't we had a friend come in for a play test and I was I was kind of baffled as he kind of placed all his pea shooters in the far right column and then the zombies would eat them and then he'd proceed to lose so we put this contextual message into the game because

we didn't want other people to to to do what he did and yet if we displayed this message to a hardcore gamer who already knew what to do it might feel kind of insulting like if we tell if they straight-up tell those players what to do we don't we don't give them the chance to feel smart and we don't when they already know how to do the right thing plus a guy like this might feel insulted if we told them too much of what he already knew to him it would feel I can hold thee or if we flashed the your pea shooters to the left message right in front of his face and meanwhile someone like my mom could really appreciate a message by like a message saying try planting your pea shooters further to the left so by using adaptive messaging we can make sure people like my mom are covered while at the same time not offending mister powerglove here you can use you can use adaptive messaging to deliver appropriate info to players of all levels and here's another check we do from levels 1 - 3 - 1 - 8 if

a player still has less than 3 sunflowers about a minute into the level we display this message we say try to plant Alice at least 3 sunflowers and followed by this planting sunflowers will improve your chances of surviving the zombie attack the point is players won't see this message if they're already doing the right thing and just like everything else there's always the possibility of going overboard there's no need to explain every single concept in a game we only need to do enough to get players to understand the basics I find that most things for a minute 30 and Beyond there they're actually better learned by experimentation instead of instead of hand-holding because you know figuring out sort of strategies and games is the best part you don't want to rob the player of that so let's look at things this example from in Santa Corrine it's the game I made before plants vs. zombies it's sort of an RTS disguised as a fish feeding simulation you click on the screen and you drop pellets of fish food for your Guppies and at some point in the game you get access to a larger fish called a carnivore it's that one on

the on the right the black and red one and they don't eat regular fish food and you kind of have to figure out what to feed them and there are a few play testers who who never figured out what to feed the carnivores and someone at PopCap suggested that we we put a little hint saying feed small Guppies to the carnivores like at the start of the game and I didn't want to I didn't want to be so in-your-face obvious and I certainly didn't want to rob the player that sense of discovery that you get when you when you do figure out how to feed them so instead we did this we did this sort of adaptive messaging after your first carnivore dies of starvation we say warning your carnivore has died just to kind of draw a little attention that you're feeding them the wrong thing and point if the player figures that it figures it out there it's all good but but after your next carnivore die as we display this and and hopefully guides the player in a little bit more of the right direction it says hint carnivores won't eat fish food and finally after

the third carnivore dies we just flat out tell them we tell them to try feeding small Guppies to your carnivores and and for the players that figure this out before we gave them all three hints they probably felt pretty good about it okay number eight is don't create noise one more reason you want to be frugal with what message you're just playing on screen is so that you don't create noise because game makers we're kind of competing with players for their attention versus all the other stuff they could be doing like surfing the internet or something so what I don't get is when a player competes with itself for the players attention because we can only rely on the player being focused on one thing at any given time if that and so it's important to be aware of what you want your player to be focused on especially in the early game you want to make it easy for your player to learn and you don't want to be showing them a bunch of irrelevant text like through cluttered UI or pop-ups or early achievements so this fake screenshot is why we were lucked into a de Chivo miss to plants vs. zombies especially once that can trigger early

in the game because we want the player here to be focused on the text at the bottom of the screen but let's just say they inadvertently unlock an achievement at the same time so now where are they supposed to focus they're like looking up and down and like they're confused if they read the achievement text and they'll be missing out on the message we actually want them to be reading so the original PC version of pvz was achievement free but every other platformer was released on eventually added them and they're not saying achievements can't be designed effectively but we wanted to avoid a situation like the above and so we opted not to include achievements at first and another reason to eliminate noise is every time we display a message to that player finds relevant we're building that players trust and likewise every time we display a message that that's irrelevant we do the opposite so if we're forcing the player to read things we want to make sure it's either enlightening or entertaining if we if we bombard the player with one relevant message after another then it

becomes kind of like the boy who cried wolf and then the player will just hit a breaking point and they'll tune out so we've essentially lost their trust and now the player is less likely to pay attention when we do have a message worth reading so basically don't cry wolf and you know and this I just wanted to demonstrate how one carefully placed comic can change everything okay number nine is to use visuals to teach so these last few sections they kind of fall a little bit out of the realm of the tutorial itself and more into the realm of make your game intuitive and it will be easier to learn for plants versus zombies we really emphasize the power that visuals can have in order to teach the player so when creating the the individual plants and zombies I tried to adhere to a couple of rules my rule number one was that you should be able to look at a plant or zombie and know what it does instantly and the benefit of this should be obvious if we can

communicate through visuals only what a plant or zombie does the less we have to teach with words so let's let's go through a few examples of the touches we added when starting with this peach feeder here in this guy's case I just I simply wanted to make sure to give him a spout so that it would look like he's shot stuff out of his mouth for the screen door zombie it kind of looks like he's holding a shield in front of him which makes you think these tougher to kill and in the case of the spike weed we put him low to the ground and added these nasty looking spikes coming out of him so that it would look like it would be bad for zombies to step on this guy and in the three Peters case he's got three heads each of which resembles a pea shooters head and if you know what a pea shooter does then you can kind of extrapolate what the three Peter might do which is to shoot three things at a time my rule number two is if I can't achieve rule number one then at least you should know what a plant or zombie

does after seeing it's do its thing after seeing it do it once for the first time so looking at the jalapeno here at first you might not you might not know exactly what it does you might just think has something to do with being hot but once you see it explode and Elayne a fire like this you quickly understand what his purpose is which is to eliminate all zombies and a horizontal line and same with the pole vaulters zombie he you might not understand what he does when he runs on screen but you quickly get it once you see him vault over one of your plants so at one point I was trying to decide how best how to best visually represent a plant that did twice the amount of damage as a peashooter and this was going to be a plant that would show up relatively early in the game so I wanted to make sure to put some extra thought into it so what should the repeater shoot a lot of you already know the answer bullets just go through this exercise if the repeater shot feathers that would be pretty

unacceptable feathers are soft and choosing projectile type that seems softer than even a pea would would not really be a good way of conveying double damage so what about something esoteric like neutronium about you but I don't know how much damage a neutronium does is it more damaging than a pea or is it less damaging gonna pee this the idea like this is the danger of relying on ideas that aren't based on something that the general public understands okay so now we're talking we could shoot swords swords definitely look like they would do more damage than Peas but how much more I would think like five times more and I could have gone with something like this but I wanted to see if we could find something that could communicate exactly twice the damage and but that said a plant that shoots swords is pretty nifty and if we're going for zany nough sui might choose something like this as long as we could theme the plant properly but for this plant I wanted to make sure because we were

giving out early in the game that it accurately communicated what it did as much as possible this is kind of another direction but also not bad I I do find myself utilizing the idea that that bigger is better quite a bit when trying to visually communicate something so because because a large pea just looks like it would do more damage than a small one okay so now we're getting close you have a plant here that shoots Peas twice as fast as a peach so every time a peashooter shoots one it it's shooting too and if you put the two side-by-side you could tell that you could easily tell that one was shooting more peas and thus doing more damage than the other and if you kind of watch over the course of maybe it's like 10 seconds you can even notice that one is shooting exactly twice as fast as the other one but that would actually take some observation so this is this is quite satisfactory but we can we can do one better than that we can take we can take the constant stream of peas that are going twice as fast and instead arrange them into volleys of two with

longer intervals in between so this is what we went with with for the repeater it fires volleys of two peas at a time and it fires those two at the same at the same rate of a pea shooter would fire one in this case you don't even have to observe for very long before you realize it's doing twice the damage as a pea shooter because they're they're firing at the same intervals yet the repeater is firing too in rapid succession every time the pea shooter fire was one four puffs shrooms we kind of we kind of had the opposite problem as the repeaters as we needed a plant that did less damage than a pea shooter and instead of having them do an arbitrarily less amount of damage I simply I simply opted to limit the puff shrooms range to what you see here most plants range in the game they they shoot across the entire screen so upon seeing the puff shroom shot just stop at the end of their range it's it's something visual you can latch on to and then you can realize that it's it's a less effective plant than the pea shooter but you'll still use these guys because they don't

cost you any Sun and you can plant them all over the place one of the games mechanics involves these gravestones which zombies rise up out of at the end of the level and we needed a plant to remove these gravestones for you and and looking at all these plants which one seems the most like it might have something to do with the gravestones if you thought this one it's what we thought too and thus the grave Buster was born because we we visually connected a little bit the the look of the gravestones with the look of the plant and the great bustard kind of chews on gravestones to get them out of your way in terms of in terms of using visuals to communicate I find that I find that Nintendo's game do this really well so let's study an example from Paper Mario in Paper Mario Mario has two attacks in the game jump and hammer here's one of the bad guys from Paper Mario it's a Goomba you jump on him and then you defeat him or you can use the hammer on him - doesn't matter you can do both but then you

encounter this guy who obviously wouldn't be good to jump on so you have to use the hammer to get rid of him and meanwhile the game has flying enemies that your hammer can't reach so it's it's best to jump on these guys and the game is filled with enemies where the very instant you look at them you know they can't be jumped on and likewise you know you can't use a hammer on any of these enemies because any bad guy that has wings or scores up in the air they're their hammer proof and what's up with this dude he's got he's got both the spike and wings and how do you even beat this thing so anyway the lesson here it might be to just base your game on an absurd enough world so that it's okay to take any enemy and stick wings or spikes on it okay number 10 is to leverage what people already know if you if you leverage what people have learned from their everyday lives you can make your games easier to learn so even even when coming up with the theme for plants vs. zombies we utilize people's general knowledge the game wasn't just a

mishmash of two different things fighting each other although it might seem that way I deliberately chose both plants and zombies for specific reasons the reason you have plants is pvz is based off of the tower defense genre and I was looking for a way to to get these stationary towers in my game but also inject them with some personality and plants were perfect because people expect plants to stay in one place and thus they made good replacements for the towers I could have made them something like jungle animals instead for instance and but people might think hey why doesn't that lion run up to the zombies and slash them or why doesn't the gazelle run away from the zombies when it's about to get eaten one of the reasons I chose zombies is because people know zombies move slowly and in creating pvz one of my goals was to keep the gameplay on a single screen so that we wouldn't have to introduce scrolling controls so zombies fit perfectly as something you would expect to move slowly and thus

it would give the player enough time to strategize another thing we another thing another thing people know is that zombies are bad and you don't want to let them get to your house we frame each level by first showing you your house in the left and then panning over to the zombies on the right and the action takes place kind of in between but it's clear that at this point that you don't want the zombies to get from the right side of your screen to the left side of the screen for in Santa quería my leverage the fact that I didn't need to teach people that fish need fish food so I was I was free to spend my energy teaching the other stuff in the game okay and plants vs. zombies we have a class of nocturnal mushrooms that fall asleep during the day so you can only use them at night and I thought it'd be neat to have a plant that sort of broke this rule one that lets you would let you use your mushrooms during the day so we made the coffee bean because people associate coffee with waking up and thus when you see your mushrooms going as Ezz it makes sense that you'd want to put a

coffee bean on them to wake them up even even though three the first three zombies you see in the game I use the idea that everyone knows that metal is tougher than plastic which is tougher than nothing at all so it's pretty easy to tell which of these zombies is tougher just by looking and also that's the only visual difference between the three people also know that magnets attract metal so it's no surprise that magnets rooms pull the metal buckets off of zombies heads we even chose our resource representation really carefully we chose Sun because people know that plants need Sun and we chose money because everyone knows that money buys you stuff it may seem obvious but but a lot of games don't actually do this a lot of games try to get kind of cute with their icons and representations of things for instance we could have chosen to have you collect brains here instead of money the problem would be that brains don't do the best job of telling the player that you're supposed to save them up to purchase stuff so it's little

choices like this that they seem relatively insignificant but when you when you kind of make these like decisions that are a little bit off and put them together they add up to kind of a confusing experience so instead we chose to be as direct as possible and just have the zombies drop money there I felt like there were enough other places to add Flair in the game where we didn't have to risk confusing players by getting fancy and basic areas such as this another thing people know is that diamonds are more valuable than gold which is more valuable than silver so I chose to base our money system they gained off of that like and even in the unlikely case that someone didn't know which which was more valuable I still I still made each one bigger than the next so that again using the idea that people generally understand that bigger is better when it comes to money and if you're observant you'll notice that we completely skip the copper or a bronze coin and that's just because we chose to do that because

copper can look pretty similar to gold at times and in pvz we only needed three kinds of money so instead of starting with copper we chose to avoid any possible confusion and just start start you off with silver even even the way we named our plants took advantage of what people already knew and coming up with plant names we could have gone the route of possessing them up with names like The Vindicator but instead we chose to we chose to name our plants a little more on the direct and descriptive side because that's just that's just one more avenue of communicating to the player what the plants would do so the P here is our games basic projectile and so it makes sense that the word P would be in all the plants that in the game that fire them the sunflower walnut marigold squash they're all examples of names that are deliberately crafted to communicate what they do based on things people already know and to delineate the nocturnal mushrooms from the other plants I made sure they attached the

suffix of shroom so that even when you have a plant that looks a little bit less like your typical mushroom like that magnet room on the bottom-right you'd still know that it's a mushroom through its name and so you thus you would know that you could only use it at night all right so we made it so here's a recap of all the points I talked about one is to blend the tutorial into the game two is to better have the player do then read three is to spread out the teaching of game mechanics four is to just get the player to do it once five is use fewer words six is use unobtrusive messaging seven use adaptive messaging eight don't create noise nine use visuals to teach and ten leverage what people already know in the last point I was going to get into but I don't think I have time so you take all these techniques and apply them and you can you can make your game as easy and pleasant to learn as pvz was and some of these things you can apply them to games that are almost complete but in general

you don't you don't want to wait for the last minute to start thinking about your tutorial you you really should be building the game for ease of learning right from the start so you can incorporate all these things so remember to think of the tutorial chameleon here and really blend your tutorial into the game like I said the best tutorial shouldn't feel like tutorials at all so to conclude I'd like to show you the main menu from our game and let's let's zoom in so you can see the Help button so we were laying at the main menu and I put that help on there kind of by default because I noticed that I just noticed every other PopCap game had a Help button and I kind of figured we'd do something with it at some point and the button just kind of sat there through much of development and when you click it nothing would happen so when the game was all done and it was time to put these these help pages in I double-checked and I asked someone at PopCap is it is it indeed a requirement for our games to have help pages and the answer I got was no so instead of putting your typical help pages there

this is what our help button leads you to it reads help for plants and zombies game when the zombies show up just sit there and don't do anything you win the game when the zombies get to your house this Help section brought to you by the zombies so I felt I felt like we did such a good job of teaching the game already that we didn't need a Help section so we just put something silly there instead so hopefully I've been able to give you some perspective on tutorials today and may your games teach the player so well and so effectively that your Help section can also be made into a joke and thank you [Applause]