Mastering Kombat: Designing Mortal Kombat 11's Empowering Tutorial Mode

[Music] hello and welcome to my talk this is mastering combat designing Mortal Kombat Elevens empowering tutorial mode I'm Bryan Kessinger I'm a gameplay programmer over at another realm studios just a little bit of housekeeping real quick this talk was originally scheduled for GDC 2020 in San Francisco but it that was cancelled because of the köppen 19 pandemic I hope everyone is healthy and staying safe out there but I'm really excited to be able to give this talk digitally and still deliver this content so let's dig in so let's go over an outline quick but first just a note though the content of this talk is gonna be delivered through a fighting game our approach is gonna be accessible to anybody who's interested in teaching a bunch of different mechanics to a wide player base of all kinds of different skill levels so first we'll talk about why we decided to build a new tutorial for a live game and we're gonna do that through injustice 2 and also an

injustice 2 we're going to talk about how we built road maps for each player segment and define the taxonomy for the tutorial mode then in Mortal Kombat 11 we'll show how that taxonomy showed us what we needed to build for the players then we'll go through a bunch of different mechanics we'll kind of list them out we'll talk about their design problems and their solutions and things like that to show how we empowered players through diverse feedback in Mortal Kombat 11 we'll talk about our potential future so the future of the nether um tutorials kind of moving forward and finally we'll kind of give a checklist for your game to use as a lens to to look at your tutorial through just a quick content warning we are going to use using videos today Mortal Kombat 11 that is an M for Mature game so there will be blood and gore and and stuff in these videos so just be aware of that so first off a little bit of history at another home studios we

make one vs. one fighting games they're usually these 2.5 D graphics these are really highly competitive fighting games right the one you're looking at right now is justice - which is our DC Comics fighter and then we'll show a little bit of Mortal Kombat 11 here these also have large cinematic story modes they have extensive single-player content and though Mortal Kombat 11 and injustice to our both fighting games they're fairly different in their metas and their core mechanics but the fundamentals of the fighting game remain the same [Music] that's definitely one of my favorite fatalities in the game for sure okay

let's go through a little bit of history so this isn't talked about this tutorial for MK 11 but before we really dig in I want to give some historical context about my personal journey and also the company's journey to get tomorrow Kombat 11 so I didn't really play many fighting games growing up I did have a Super Nintendo where we did have Street Fighter 2 turbo I remember kind of just mashing buttons against my brother and whatnot but mostly growing up I played a lot of competitive shooters especially in my teen years I loved to compete and a very competitive person but I would always try to get into fighting games but I would play them for about a month before dropping them I just couldn't really understand the fundamentals I couldn't get to that competitive level that I wanted to that I was used to playing in games and every game I would think this is it right this is gonna be the fighting game that I get into is and you know this was I did this with Street Fighter 4 I did this with model vs. Capcom 3 and all these kind of to the

same fate right I would play them for a little while I would recognize how difficult they are how how complex the systems are to understand and I would just inevitably drop them so if we fast forward a little bit to PAX East 2011 that's a convention out in Boston me my friends go to that every year we love going out there to kind of play the unreleased games and connect with the gaming community and this was about the impact ceased 2011 this is about a month before Mortal Kombat 9 was being released and I remember playing the demo on the show floor at PAX East and again right I hit that same mentality of like this is gonna be the fighting game I get into this is it this is finally the one and so we played the demo at PAX and we loved it we loved it it was awesome as this gory spectacle it was this ridiculous over-the-top fighting game that you know we had a nostalgia for his kids playing you know Mortal Kombat 2 but

this was in 3d now right this is these graphics were incredible so we played the demo and I remember getting this crazy ridiculous t-shirt from the developers after completing the demo and you know as a teenager you're stoked right you got to talk to the developer you you got this amazing t-shirt and you can't wait to wear you can't wait to play the game when it comes out so the game finally comes out and I buy the one hundred and fifty dollar collector's edition that came with this tournament stick which you could actually still see I still have it's right over there and this was it right like how could I possibly fail this was gonna be the fighting game I was gonna get into right I have the stick and everything I have to be good at this one turns out no I remember going to college and getting actually absolutely destroyed by my roommate playing this game and sure enough about a month later I dropped it again so if we fast forward to get into 2016 I'm finishing my masters in Chicago

and I get a job at another um studios ironically working on fighting games so the irony is obvious there I had never been super into fighting games and I'd always tried but I just couldn't break through that barrier but I was still true cardless right I'm working in video games this is my dream so maybe I'd finally learn to play a fighting game maybe this was finally the time that working on a fighting game would finally get me to learn so during development I tried learning to play again not too much available I really needed some structure but the tutorial wasn't done yet co-workers would try to help me they would try to you know give me some advice but I would kind of just go into practice mode and flail around I didn't really know what I was doing so and also the tutorial at another Elm is commonly kind of deprioritized in the development cycle it's usually built a few months

out from ship three to six months it starts being worked on and that's because of our two-year tight development cycle on top of the fact that the games kind of voice changing during development and it's hard to build a tutorial for a game that's not fully designed yet so I needed some structure I needed some hand-holding in order to learn because I needed to be taught from the ground up I needed to learn fighting games at their core hopefully that's forward a little bit again we're just about to launch injustice 2 and the user and focus testing that's coming back about the game is that the first time user experience is in pretty rough shape and justice 2 had some complicated RPG type mechanics that weren't being understood super well and on top of that the tutorial was just in kind of a rough state so let's talk about that launch tutorial so this launch tutorial taught what was new in this fighting game without ever teaching fighting games as

a whole the tutorial kind of assumed that you had already played fighting games and you were coming in with some pre-existing knowledge it was completely linear too so if you struggled with one lesson you would you wouldn't have access to the next lesson so it was kind of excluding content there is also no menu context for how for progress throughout the tutorial or how long the lesson was which kind of led to this like education fatigue of like what am i doing where am I going how long is this can I stop now type of mentality also in this tutorial the difficulty ramped up way too quickly we have some data that shows that this one specific lesson on special move cancels had about ten times the average drop out of the other lessons and we'll talk about this more later so remember that that lesson specifically the special move cancels and to make matters a little bit worse there's this first time

user experience pop-up that gets triggered when you click on single-player for the first time so if a player goes to play story modes they click single-player a pop-up comes up and it's like hey we noticed you haven't played the game before do you want to try that tutorial so it funnels them into the tutorial to start with and it kind of creates this broken player loop from the beginning as the tutorials not in great shape it ramps up in difficulty too quickly it excludes content all those reasons we just talked about right and that user research report kind of told us this and it kind of exposed this for us but we've never enough time to fix it before launch this is something we would have to address later so here's a video of injustice two at launch you can see here here's the pop-up that pushes you to the tutorial if you select it you'll jump right into gameplay if you hit yes here you'll jump right into the tutorial immediately but if we select no we can actually go to the tutorial menu and we can show you what this menu looks like

at launch so it's kind of just this linear menu you can see those red items are locked out because you haven't completed basics you don't get access to environment or combos or special moves and there's no progress there right you can't see what you've done what you've completed etc so the higher-ups gave us a the go-ahead to fix the first-time user experience with a strike team so the first thing we wanted to do was fix the tutorial because if we can't teach players to play our game how do we expect to retain or grow our player base this right here is kind of the mission statement of this whole effort right we want players to play our game we want them to play for longer we have to fix this so the injustice to legendary edition we knew was going to launch the following year this was type of are kind

of like enhanced edition including all the DLC we'd be launching we knew this was coming and we knew more comment eleven pre-production was starting soon so we knew this would happen again for a future date a future game if we didn't fix it now and during development of a new game the meta of that game and the design of that game is constantly changing right so it's hard to design a tutorial from scratch while you're also building the game that you're trying to teach so our idea would be to build a new tutorial and it would be a foundation for games to come right and we would build it for the injustice to legendary addition we would ship it for this live game and we would use the existing and injustice to launch addition to build this new tutorial because the games already designed right so now we have that foundation to work with this was super exciting for me personally I didn't work on the launch tutorial but now being on this strike team I would have an opportunity to

build the tools I wish I had when I was trying to learn Mortal Kombat 9 when I was trying to learn Street Fighter 4 or Marvel vs. Capcom 3 all those times when I had tried to get into fighting games and failed I would have a chance to try and build some tools for players so that they didn't have those same experiences so let's talk about the injustice two legendary edition that the all-in-one package edition that would launch with our new tutorial this would have to solve the hard problems in an existing product right and we're gonna launch that with this legendary edition ski this was kind of similar to a format that the company was already familiar with we had reworked our networking model to become this gGPO rollback networking type for Mortal Kombat XL so we had used Mortal Kombat X as a foundation to rework our networking model to the launch of the Mortal Kombat X I'll write and you can see Mike still owns 2018 GDC talk 8 frames in 16 milliseconds I think it's called rollback networking

in mortal combat as well check that out if you're interested in that but the point is is that the company the company was familiar with this idea of like let's use the existing products let's leverage that and launch and kind of test this new feature that we want in this legendary edition this Mortal Kombat XL Edition that's coming out in the future so the legendary Edition tutorial so this is kind of the constraints we were working with during development we had six months we had one designer in Michael Belafonte he was the lead designer on this mode and we had one programmer in me and we also had the resources of the UI UX team but it's important to know here that these people all had their own responsibilities as well outside of working on this tutorial for the injustice two legendary edition so time was kind of the essence right like we do only had so many resources okay so let's talk about our player segments these player segments are usually defined by your

publisher or your marketing teams usually put usually companies have these kind of already built out for you if not you should ask and you should try and create these these are super useful but kind of before we dive into this chart despite the fact that we're in fighting games we have a really wide variety of player bases that engage with our product in all kinds of different ways so this chart here has skill going up in retention going to the right we have campaigners and couch players these are kind of lower skilled groups of players and they don't retain as well they kind of play the story mode and they usually kind of drop the game then we have the dabblers who are kind of in the middle right they retain fairly well in our middling skill group and then we have the connoisseurs which are high retention highly skilled players they kind of engage in all different types of modes after trying them as a dabbler and then finally we have the PvP online

group which is almost like your competitive multiplayer not almost it is your competitive multiplayer group of players usually players who are interested in watching eSports and that type of thing and these players retain really well but they're incredibly skilled so all these different player segments they come in with different fighting game experiences and they all want different experiences out of our fighting game so put and if you can see look at the chart here players participating in modes that require more skill or generally retain better and this is completely conjecture but it's likely because they're better at the game and they just enjoy it more so the idea is to build a tutorial roadmap that would allow these players to increase their engagement and potentially move to the next segment and we're gonna do that by reducing the barriers that they run into we're gonna provide them all types of feedback and we're gonna pace out the content as much as we possibly can

so let's take a look at our taxonomy this is kind of the structure we decided on and we're gonna walk through how we decided on that as well so we have three sections representing three different types of preparedness for play we have the basics section which prepares the player for story mode and couch couch versus we want these players to play these modes without button mashing and they're gonna do that by playing through the basics of our tutorial mode it covers all core mechanics and it's as easy as possible that is really crucial here also it's available before the game finishes installing so if you play games on Xbox and Playstation you'll notice that when you start installing it it'll have that like playable state on the progress bar on the install progress and this part of the tutorial mode the basics part is in the launched chunk meaning as soon as it hits that playable mark the basics of the tutorial is available and ready for players the second section is the

advanced section this prepares the player for extended single-player modes so after story mode and it finishes covering all remaining mechanics so if you've completed basics and you've completed advanced you've now been exposed to and taught every mechanic in the fighting game and lastly is the strategy section the strategy section prepares the player for online multiplayer it covers the risks and rewards of all different type of common gameplay scenarios and this is content we've never taught before the advanced section in the basics section was mostly taught in the original launch tutorial but now we're kind of spreading out that content through all different types of feedback so it's kind of spread out and paced out much better for the player whereas the strategy section is all new content so here's the top level menu screenshot for injustice - there's more granular categories inside these sections so you have the basics section

the advanced and the combat strategy there's also characters here that's the character specific tutorials there's there's also a tutorial for every single character in the game we're not going to touch on that today in this talk that's kind of a separate talk and that content didn't really change much from the launch tutorial so and lastly there's also a practice cell here as well so this is kind of your one-stop shop for learning this is the learn hub as we call it but we're gonna be focusing on basics advanced and strategy so the taxonomy it's fully Alucard this structure is fully ala carte we are eliminating as many content barriers as possible we're not going to say if you can't complete this one you don't have access to this one you might understand the concept but it might be really difficult to perform we want you to have access to the next lesson regardless but it is the whole tutorial is still intended to be played

linearly because we are building on previous concepts quite a bit so this hierarchy also allows for way better content bucketing it also allows us to celebrate at different scales and reward at different scales so the players just gonna feel better because we've kind of structured this content more it's way less of a flat hierarchy we're gonna celebrate them more and give them more rewards and you can see that here so I de justice twos launch we rewarded the player just one time and that was at the end of the tutorial and it was only for it was for 500 source crystals which is our premium currency that players can use in-game to buy skins and all types of other stuff for the injustice to legendary edition every lesson we reward you with the mother box and after every category we reward you with more source crystals in if you complete one of the sections we give you an exclusive piece of Batman gear so these rewards create incentive for players because you have to remember

the tutorial people still have to want to learn so by giving them these rewards it incentivizes them to play okay so let's take a look at this learn hub right here in this video so this you can see here there's these progress bars it gives them a better sense of completion in the old tutorial you had no idea where you were in relation to the to the bigger picture right so here's the inside of the Advanced section you can see we're scrolling through the categories here and now on the right each category is updating its lessons in that list yeah this these progress bars are great because players would often ask like how close am I to being done nord did it even save my progress so it's also important to note that after a player completes a category we force them back to this menu we don't let them continue on to the next lesson because we want them to see their progress we want to show them that it's okay to stop playing go play the actual

game with what you've learned and this is kind of pacing out the content much better for players we don't want them to complete this all in one sitting there's a lot of content here hours of content if they do complete it in one sitting they're not really likely to retain too much so we want them to go play the game okay so remember our player segments from before we're gonna combine these player segments with our new taxonomy so here's the taxonomy that we have basics advanced and strategy right and let's combine the two so when we combine the two here's what we get you have campaigners and couch players if they complete basics they're much more likely to become dabbler right they're ready for that content that dopplers are participating in and the same goes for completing advanced as a dabbler you're ready to become a connoisseur this is kind of our road map right we need to give players options and ways to engage with our product so really the goal here

is we can graduate those bottom players to the dabbler section where they're equipped with enough knowledge to participate in all the modes of the game they're much more likely to continue playing for longer babblers retain three and a half times as much as campaigners and couch players do and the same goes for graduating a dabbler to a connoisseur connoisseurs retained two and a half as much as dabblers do ultimately we do want players to play what they want to play and play what they're interested in though so if a couch player who's playing you know mostly local versus against their friend really only enjoys the multiplayer aspects of our game well we need to give them an avenue to get to PvP online we need to give them this road map you know they might have to do a lot of works to get there and play some other content along the way but we need to give them that option we need to show them that path that that's possible to do so here's just a little bit of data about going from injustice to

launch tutorial to injustice to use legendary edition the injustice to launched tutorial had six lessons and 15 exercises remember seeing that that that linear list with the red words blocked out for each lesson in the justice to legendary Edition had this 54 lessons and 80 exercise this is a large explosion of content to launch with the legendary edition be also because we pasted it out much better and we go into much deeper detail as well and so we launched the legendary edition tutorial and people really liked it not many people really want to play a new tutorial a year after the game's launch but from those who did play it was received really well and so here's some video of Mortal Kombat 11 in the tutorial that we launched with Mortal Kombat 11 this is the same structure this is this taxonomy this foundation that we bill in injustice to legendary

edition this paid dividends for us in Mortal Kombat 11 so after the legendary edition of injustice - we knew what the menu structure would look like we knew what content we needed to teach 2 teach fighting games and then we would just layer on top the content we would have to teach 2 teach MK 11 this allowed us to spend a ton of time building flexibly from the engineering side while also refining and streamlining existing content from the design side so for the rest of this talk we're going to be using more Kombat 11 as example despite the fact that some of the features were gonna talk about were conceived for injustice - oh one more thing the most important change we made from a justice to a legendary addition to Mortal Kombat 11s tutorial is that we changed all C's to Kay's because well Mortal Kombat okay there's not all C's to case but there's rules to this you'd have to ask

Ed Boon though it's some complex rules ok so deciding on mechanics we're gonna walk through how we decided on what mechanics to build we're gonna go over a bunch of mechanics individually here to show how they empower players with diverse feedback and we're also going to include design problem statements and our solutions for them so we have to solve the most common problems players encounter in a specific section we need to teach through as many forms of feedback as we can and we have to solve the problems that relate to that sections goals so let's dive into that one a little bit deeper so if we have basics advanced and strategy first I should note that the granularity here isn't important it's more about the process here so we have basics advanced in strategy the goals of basics are to teach the player to play story mode without button mashing it's to cover core mechanics and it's as easy as

possible and so in order to meet these goals we have a set of concepts that we need to teach and those concepts are movement blocking throws environment interaction special moves basic combos and fatal blows these mechanics teach the concepts through various forms of feedback or I should say rather the mechanics that we're gonna be teaching are teaching these concepts through various forms of feedback through visual feedback through auditory feedback all different types of visual feedback as well we're gonna dive into all of that so let's look at advance the advance the goals of advanced are to teach the player to play extended single-player modes and it's also to finish covering the remaining mechanics so in order to meet these goals we have to teach these concepts special move cancels jump in attacks etc etc right there's a list of these things and we can do the same for

strategy as well here we're going to be teaching online competitive multiplayer and we want to cover the risk sum or rewards of a bunch of gameplay options right not what these options are but how to use them in battle and so there's a list of concepts where we need to teach here as well again remember that the granularity here isn't as important so we need to find the biggest bang for our buck when teaching these mechanics so an example is that the basic section is to prepare the player for story mode combos and how to input them are fundamental for story mode and the game as a whole newcomers really struggled to understand this system the combo system and they're intimidated by it so our solution was the combo windows combo windows let's walk through our design problem statement here players have difficulty understanding the input system and when to press buttons to execute a combo combos are fundamental for basic play

and essential for a good experience excuse me so our solution is to expose the input system in a visual way that shows players how combos can be performed and provides concise feedback this module that we're about to walk through is intended to be an in-game coach that concise feedback portion of this solution is incredibly important okay so here's our combo windows and this video is gonna loop so we're gonna walk through it the input system in general works as a buffer the combo system is sometimes referred to as a dial in system this means that you can buffer or dial in inputs way ahead of when they're needed as long as you press a button before that buttons deadline then it will be read by the system this means that combos in nether realms games are almost never timing based you don't have to wait for one punch to land before pressing the neck

button in the combo that would be called a link that's a whole nother concept we could teach later but we don't really have many links in our game there are a few but you don't have to wait for the first punch to land in order to press the second button that's what's most important and combos are essentially like for example press these three buttons and the character outputs these three attacks in a row so we workshopped a ton of different solutions for this module in particular we kind of you know started mapping out like these guitar hero s highways where buttons were like flowing down and stuff we user tested a lot of these things and this particular format solved our initial goals and it also ironed out some of the kinks that we were dealing with with some of the other formats so this solves the original set of issues right it exposes the input system and it doesn't also say to the player that there's one timing

for completing a combo that's important because as long as you're before the deadline the button will be accepted so if you explain this to a newcomer performing these combos becomes much much easier both anecdotally and through guerrilla testing people were just not in putting the buttons fast enough they just needed to be told that they just needed to be told you have to do it faster this is what we mean when we say this module is a type of coach it tells you what you're doing wrong and it gives you actionable feedback so this module covers a ton of potential problems different players might have through a variety of visuals if you execute the combo but miss all the attacks the windows are orange it's this type of like soft fail type of situation where as the green of the success state really pops off to let the player know that they what they did was correct in the worst case scenario here a timeout will occur and that will point the player to the demo feature you can kind of see

that in the top right over here in just a second that message that's popping out it's a little bit yeah we're gonna slide over yep so press the pad button to see the correct timing we're gonna go over the demo feature in a little bit so don't worry about that so a player may not understand the windows right it might be a little bit confusing on how to me you know just just interpret the windows so that failure reason in the context that the failure reason is providing is super super important and the failure reason again it's contextual to your result so depending on what you did it will give you a different reason so we need to be able to catch these players at different points of failure and provide them actionable feedback this is why the variety of feedback here is so important so and we brought this system over from injustice to you can see how up top here this is the injustice two legendary edition version on the bottom is the Mortal Kombat

version it's kind of walking through the same combo showing you the differences but I'm gonna talk about differences right now so to expose them to you so an injustice - there was this - past system one was detecting the immediate feedback of the button to see if you press the correct button and then the second pass was to see if you output the current move so you can see here there's green checkmarks but red boxes that's just confusing so it's kind of leading to this excess of information it's like well what did I do wrong the box was red but the check mark check box was green I don't really understand so we got rid of that from Mortal Kombat 11 in more Kombat 11 it it's surrendering the feedback the immediate feedback in favor of more concise actionable feedback these weapons windows they happen so fast that the lack of immediate feedback is really just relative and it's not really missed by the player so again this is not necessarily meant to be read

and understood it's just showing here this is a flowchart of the windows from a Justice to legendary addition to the Mortal Kombat 11 version and showing how simple the Mortal Kombat 11 version is in comparison to the injustice 2 version so again the lack of feedback isn't really missed because it was relatively too short anyway and at the end of the window we give a single reason along with a piece of contextual feedback to that result that's what's most important and because the tool itself is simpler we can actually extend its functionality into special move cancels and it doesn't add that much complexity for the player remember this is the thing I told you to remember earlier when we were talking about injustice to launch tutorial about how this particular lesson special move cancels had ten times the average dropout of the other lessons the injustice to completion rate at launch for this lesson was 51% 51% completion

rate in MK 11 the completion rate for this specific lesson special move cancels again was 97 percent and again completion rate is the percentage of players that completed it after having an attempt so 97 percent of players completed this after having an attempt whereas an injustice to was only 51 percent and that's because partially because we're pacing out the content much better this special move cancels lesson is actually in the Advanced section in MK 11 whereas remember it was part of the one of these seven lessons in the injustice to launch tutorial but we're also empowering players with a tool where they get feedback and then get feedback through a variety of visuals and it's just better it's more concise it's actionable okay so speaking of the Advanced section let's move into some of the mechanics we talked there so remember that the Advanced section is to

prepare the player for extended single player modes it finished is covering the core mechanics and here's where we found two opportunities for really high-value wins in the Advanced section we're gonna teach these timing based situational mechanics and we're also gonna teach frame data we continue to get a lot of value out of the mechanics we're teaching here and a lot of the tools that we built to teach these mechanics and concepts later on in the strategy section because we go into them in a much deeper format so let's go over to the situational mechanics first the problems even here is that some mechanics can only be performed in specific situations they must be executed within a timeframe players really struggle to recognize these opportunities they struggle to recognize these windows of opportunity so our solution is we're gonna put the player in that situation we're gonna freeze the world freeze the whole game during that window of opportunity and then we're gonna color their character

and wait for their input before unfreezing the world so here's what that looks like we freeze the world and then you perform the inputs and the world continues right this is a perfect case of Show and Tell we're telling you through the instructions in the text boxes prior that you can roll out at the apex of your fall arc right but then we also demonstrate it and it's much easier to understand the demonstration and here we're kind of going through a bunch of other mechanics that we use that we taught through this world freezing we use this world freezing to teach wake up attacks air escapes special move cancels thrill breaks I know I'm saying a lot of things that are specific to fighting games but the point is is that we got a lot of bang for our buck out of this world pausing type of feature so the second high-value win we got in the Advanced section was frame data the problem with frame data is that players have difficulty understanding frame data and/or they have trouble seeing the

stages of frame data take place on their character our solution was to expose the frame data visually as a highlight effect on both characters this is a new form of visual design a new form of visual feedback to meet the specific need that we're teaching we want to keep the player focused on looking at the character we don't want to distract them with additional UI so again we're building something we're building a set of tools to meet the specific needs here this feedback is very contextual to this specific session ok so let's do a little bit of a deep dive on frame data this is gonna be fairly technical two fighting games but you don't need to understand it and what it's important for players to understand if they're going to compete in fighting games okay so the it's important to note that the player does get this info pasted out over several lessons and we're gonna kind of place through it pretty quick so

buckle up so frame data our game is locked at sixty frames per second that means that each frame in our game takes sixteen point six milliseconds each character each character move rather every character move goes through three stages of frame data and that's what we call the anatomy of a move you go through startup you go through active frames and then you go through recovery frames knowing and understanding a character's frame data is essential for high level play so let's take a look at this anatomy of a move so we teach this through showing a character highlight here's a video mock-up of the anatomy of a move you go through startup into active and into recovery and this way again this video is gonna loop so every move has different data in terms of the length of each of these stages but every move has these stages and you can see it again here with a different move first

we're gonna go into startup in blue then we'll go into active frames in red and quickly into recovery frames in green so what does this mean for the game the outcome of a moves recovery creates advantage and disadvantage for players the length of a moves recovery depends on its outcome each move will have different recovery links for whether it was hit it blocked or it whiffed this is fighting games at their core this is like this is it right you're kind of doing this addition and subtraction on the fly of like Oh am i an advantage or am i and disadvantage and that's all the outcome of the anatomy of a move that's all the outcome of startup frames active frames and recovery frames so let's take a look at advantage and disadvantage so when the character highlight comes off is when the character can move again

so scorpion here has 17 frames of advantage and you can see the highlight comes off of him 17 frames faster than it comes off of Cassie so this is another great example of Show and Tell will tell you it takes 43 frames to recover well or sorry that you'll have 43 frames of advantage on hit sorry because of your recovery but seeing it is so much easier it's actually digestible once you see it okay so we've talked about a bunch of well I should say end of fighting game technical talk let's move back to some more design conceptual stuff previously we talked about some specific ways to solve very specific problems but there are some mainstays that are always there throughout our tutorial to help out in first we teach through text without any vo our whole tutorial is taught through

text and that's for a variety of reasons localization is really tough with vo our content was really volatile during development so getting those recordings of vo was going to be really tough it's kind of a decision we made early on to not do vo but at the same time we would love to do vo and we'll talk about that in the future of our tutorial so we need to minimize the amount of text and pop-up boxes in a row as much as possible we want players playing the game we don't want them reading clumps and clumps of text right so to help with that we highlight key words because people well people just skim text box nobody's gonna read the whole thing right there are certain words here that jump out at you and that's jumping attacks blade jab and basic attack so we do have a coloring scheme where blue is a specific character move so cabal has a blade jab move there which is why that's blue and then core fighting game

concepts are highlighted in yellow so again we need to spread out these complex concepts and highlight these key words to make it easier for the player we also really need to reduce the amount of technical fighting game community terminology there's a lot of community-based terminology and fighting games and we need to reduce that whenever possible because it's going to confuse players who are new to the genre so this text box for example says if a character performs a jumping attack and misses they have a brief recovery period after they land during which they cannot move attack or block this is actually teaching a fighting game community concept known as trip guard but we never use the word trap guard so that's just important to note okay so we teach through text and we build specific tools to meet the specific content well what happens if a player is still struggling because different players have different

problems they just do some get stuck on the on different things in the same lessons some get stuck on the same things but in different lessons and we saw this a lot in our user testing when we were watching players go through our tutorial for the first time basically not everyone learns in the same ways we need some catch alls so one of our catches is the AI demos and the problem statement for our AI demos is that players sometimes don't know what the expected outcome of a task is or what it is they should be doing and this is after they've read the instructions right so our solution was have the AI perform the task to show the player and this is an opt-in button this is an opt-in feature for every lesson so let's take a look at this yes every lesson has this feature available in this tutorial

so you can see here there's a view demo button right underneath the controller and here you can see the orange buttons highlighting in the AI performing the orange buttons are the AI button presses that's the AI performing the move and here you can see some blue button presses on top of the orange button presses on that controller the blue button presses human are the are the player I should say sorry we use human and AI a lot in our code so the intention of that is that you can watch the AI perform this task was the orange buttons and watch them perform an in-game and then hopefully you can kind of play overtop of it with your buttons and try and get some of that muscle memory down it's kind of this Simon Says on the controller and you can this will loop this isn't a looping this lobbying this is a looping video but additionally that demo just loops until you exit so you can get the muscle memory down just by

watching and then kind of trying to participate when you're ready so let's talk about audio reinforcement another catch-all for us the problem is that players have difficulty understanding the cadence required for different mechanics including combos punishes defensive options and more it's kind of the when do I press buttons so our solution assign a unique audio cue to each button on the controller and play them during all the AI demos so I just showed you that the AI demos there were pressing orange buttons and now we're going to assign an audio cue to each of those and so here's an anecdote that kind of illustrates this right some of my co-workers were at a fighting game tournament and they were up in their hotel room and one of one of the co-workers Danish he was trying to learn a particular combo he knew what buttons he needed to press but he didn't know when to press those buttons right so

another co-worker Mike he drummed it out for him thoughte got a Baba that was the combo in Danish after trying it a bunch of times on his own not being able to get it Mike drumming it out bah bah bah bah bah that cadence hearing that auditory like cadence Danish got it like the next try or something like that so we can't really send a mic to every player's house in order to drum out combos for them so we have to find a solution for this in our so was this audio reinforcement in the AI demos so you can hear the clicks ear I'm gonna let her play one more time so you can hear those clicks right and for different combos this is gonna be really useful and a lot of other fighting games I shouldn't say a lot other fighting games do this like Tekken does this and

it's really effective and again this is because not all people learn effectively in the same waves by adding these audio cues those who are more auditory learners are me or they're musically inclined are much more likely to learn this combo faster for me this is one of my personal favorite additions to MK 11 it's a very simple feature but it really broadens the avenues for players to learn it also adds a really great accessibility option for those who are visually impaired so for previous games if a player needed to know wanted to know when to press the buttons or needed to know what how this cadence of this combos was to be performed they'd have to go to YouTube they'd have to you know potentially take out a second device go to YouTube watch a video just to understand this and most players aren't gonna overcome that barrier so by putting this in game we're reducing that barrier we're reducing that need or keeping them in the game hopefully playing the game for longer so

tips and hints is another one of our catch-all features the problem statement here is players who struggle and a particular task aren't given additional context or help to get them through so our solution is that a custom message per tutorial task after a certain amount of time appears with some extra help so let's take a look at that if a player isn't completing a task after reading the instructions watching the demo trying for a minute or two we have to try to help them right we've we've already empowered them with a lot of different tools but they're still not getting it they need to they need some extra help so you can see here Raiden's kind of blocking he's not completing this task maybe he doesn't know what to do and then this tip pops up and it says when performing a special move as a reversal attack the timing of the final button press is the most important and then boom he gets it right obviously that's a an ideal scenario we're gonna fast-forward through this one we're

gonna show another example again the delayed timing here is super important we don't want to overwhelm the player so we just fast-forward through the Sub Zero video the Raiden demo was real-time and some of these tips would just remind you to watch the demo sometimes it's that simple like hey just reminder that the demo features over here go check that out if you're having trouble some of them would ask them to pay attention to the audio timings of specific Cadence's and combos and some are super specific to the lesson at hand lastly we wanted to make the player feel good while learning and we need to set up their expectations properly having their expectations in line can really help reduce education fatigue and make sure that they aren't overwhelmed and that they go play the game with what they've learned we often have this like oh let's let's show this first so yeah we want better celebration we want to celebrate more often we want to celebrate bigger we also have these sound cues that we added for successful

tasks and some successful subtasks so I kind of have this like hey do this task x times right do it three times do it five times in a row and there's this nice like audio cue this cheerful sound cue that kind of makes you feel good after completing something these are little things to help celebrate the player right to lift them up there's two more things that we can do to reduce this type of fatigue this kind of education fatigue and we're gonna do that through context and expectations the problem here is that players may not know what they just completed they did the whole tutorial they completed everything in that lesson but maybe they don't remember what that was called and they don't know what's up next so at the end of a lesson we show this pop-up box and we say hey you've completed the special move cancellous lesson the next lesson is jumping attacks so now players feel good for having completed something they know what they just completed and they can make an informed decision about what they want to continue on to the next

lesson or not and if the lesson you just completed is the last lesson in a category in one of those buckets we force you back to the menu you can see there's no next lesson option on this screenshot and that's because we're trying to spread this out or trying to spread it out pace out the learning reduce the education fatigue make sure players aren't overwhelmed and again make sure they go play the game because if players again if they just barrel through this entire tutorial in one sitting and they're not likely to retain too much and this is kind of something we loved about killer instincts tutorial they straight up say like hey go play the game come back later stop what you're doing go go play the game that's super cool and by sending players back to the menu they could put their progress into context with the remaining tutorial content it also gives them a clean break it shows them it's okay to stop playing again just pacing it out setting up those expectations so after

we're finding the Mortal Kombat 11 version based on what we had learned from the injustice to legendary edition launch people really liked it this was great to see I mean obviously we had been putting a ton of work into this and ton of thought so the fact that people like this this was spectacular to see it really was I mean there was a look at the bottom here there was even an appreciation post on reddit I mean let's get much better than that okay so let's talk about the future of our tutorial at another realm again this is all conjecture all of it none of it's set in stone we need to do a better job of setting expectations of pro level mechanics in MK 11 there was a particular pro level mechanic called flawless block attacks and some players were trying that tutorial over and over and over again really struggling with it and I think if there was maybe just you

know like some UI difficulty indicators maybe in the menu saying like whatever right like beginning beginner or moderate Pro or you know three levels of like green orange red hey this is really hard you shouldn't stress yourself out about this type of thing I think that could help alleviate some of that we also want to loop lessons on completion a lot of players we're revisiting our tutorials but the tutorial kind of brings if after completing a lesson it brings you to that menu of like hey do you want to go to the next lesson or do you want to retry and retry would put you back through a loading screen which is in the end of the world our loading screens are pretty short relatively but if we can loop the lessons on completion and kind of setup with a button to advance the tutorial and we can message that properly I think that would really help we'd also love to do voiceovers we talked about this before about how we teach through text we don't have any vo we'd love to do this we also need to do

we've done some incentivizing of tutorials but we need to incentivize more right now you still have to want to learn right if you're playing the tutorial you want to learn we've thought about some gamification stuff this was mostly a resource issue and also kind of a philosophical difference at another realm we don't want to take you out of the context of the fight if we gamified the tutorial through like minigames and things like that it would be taking you out of the context of the fight so when you go to do those things on an actual fight you probably won't know what you're doing we want to keep you in the fight as much as possible we also have some secret stuff in the works which is really exciting I wish I could share but you have to stay tuned okay so a checklist for your game so this is kind of your checklist your your lens to look at your game thrill prototype using a

completed game if possible I understand this is a luxury organize your players into segments of how they interact with your game what experiences these players want from your product decide the knowledge and skills each segment needs in order to get the experience that they desire this becomes your tutorial structure and roadmap remember those are those graphs where we had the player segments and we mapped basics advanced and strategy onto it showing this kind of roadmap pathway of how players can kind of graduate to these other segments create diverse ways to teach players the necessary content you can do this through UI visuals in-world visuals gameplay demonstrations audio feedback and you need to find some capsules if you can because if a player is struggling and they're still not getting it then they're probably just gonna put your game down and lastly pace out the content appropriately reward players along the way create force breaks and spots for

players to see their progress this is going to help reduce that education fatigue and pace out the content so that they actually learn here's the full checklist you take a screenshot of this if you'd like so if we take this checklist and we let's look at how it applies to Mortal Kombat 11 how did we use this checklist okay so we used injustice 2 as a proving ground for prototyping this feature and again I mentioned before I realize that's a luxury but a lot of games are sequels these days so if you do have a completed game even if you're not gonna launch it with that game you might be worthwhile prototyping stuff in that game before trying to do it in the in the new game that's already in development right because that new game that's in development it could change it's probably changing underneath you maybe some systems aren't online yet you get the point organize

your players into segments of how they interact with your game this is our campaigners our couch players our dabblers our connoisseurs and PvP again this is something that usually your publisher has or your marketing team has and if not if you have an analytics department they probably have this ask around I'm sure you I'm sure you have player segments decide the knowledge and skills each segment needs in order to get the experience they desire so again this is our basics advanced in strategy and that correlates to story extended single-player and online PvP respectively mapping that basics advanced and strategy on tour player segments give us gives us that roadmap career I create diverse ways to teach players the necessary content and again we did this through all kinds of different stuff combo windows through UI right character coloring world pausing AI demonstrations button audio feedback tips and hints and lastly pace out the

content appropriately we rewarded players after each lesson and category we spaced out the content into more sections we forced a return to the menu after completing a category as well again pacing out that content reducing education fatigue thanks thank you for watching this talk there's also a few people i'd like to thank-- specifically firstly Mike Bell honey you were an incredible partner in this project and a mentor and all this to me working with you is spectacular Tarun silverstein in the entire UI UX team for their contributions they were essential to this thank you John Edwards for creating space for us to do this everyone at NetherRealm and Warner Brothers for allowing us to make video games it really is a dream I mean Chung and GDC I mean Sean thank you so much for mentoring me through this GDC process for helping me with

this talk giving feedback on this talk this was a spectacular opportunity thank you to Amy and GDC okay so normally there's a Q&A session after one of these GDC talks we're not in a live studio audience right now obviously so I asked on Twitter and I said hey like I realize you haven't seen the talk but if you have any questions I'd love to include at the end of the presentation so here's some of these questions we're gonna go through some of these now what other questions are sorry what other tutorials did you draw inspiration from any other genres yeah tons fighting games skull girls guilty gear killer instinct Tekken Street Fighter all of these have good components in them we drew tons of inspiration from these tutorials and there's genres guitar hero and rock band for sure we talked about that and how we kind of prototype some of that Guitar Hero Highway stuff the one that's maybe not so obvious would be sports games in NHL the hockey game

there's this vision trainer that's excellent it kind of puts like stuff on the ice for you showing you what passing lanes are available what shot lanes are available that's spectacular and they'll be the show the baseball game has the swing timings visualizations so you can see if you are like too early or too late or if you were above it or below it all that stuff we drew inspiration from how much did accessibility factor into your planning production and design a ton it absolutely did factor in actual remember seeing a video of a blind gamer on YouTube playing injustice - and it was spectacular - it was awesome I mean this guy was kicking ass it was very cool so it absolutely did factor in especially with the audio tones and the character coloring the mesh coloring initially the character highlights the character colors were red and green which to my understanding is one of the

most common forms of color blindness so we switched that to blue and orange to help with that and the audio tones are something that obviously has accessibility right in baked into it and was something we were really excited about I would love to expand that feature to the rest of the game in future titles I think it's really helpful and just easy to understand did combo trial tutorials like an injustice to ever get brought up again in the making of the MK 11 tutorials yes absolutely so for context here in injustice twos legendary edition that reworked tutorial that we launched there were these trials which was kind of like the final exam to some of the lessons if you will they were really difficult and they were really long and I don't think we did a really good job of relaying the expectations there about what those were so we can definitely do

that better in the future but in reality this was a time constraint we didn't have these in Mortal Kombat 11 because of time constraints excuse me these are also really prone to breaking as we update character frame data character moves character meta so those are really volatile and kind of fragile it's a lot of maintenance so it was just a time constraints issue with Mortal Kombat 11 but it's something we'd like to revisit in the future one thing that immediately got my attention in the MK 11 tutorial in comparison to MK X's specifically is that plenty of characters were used throughout was there a conscious choice of specific characters for specific concepts yes absolutely every character was hand-picked because they teach or display a specific concept really well right Jade was the attacker in the flawless block attacks lesson because she has this staff move that's

easily telegraphed it's it's easy to see in creating block pressure we use Cassie because she has really good frame traps in her frame data Johnny Cage was taught to teach combo limitations and cornered combos because he has an attack that launches without any meter cost Mike Belafonte did a fantastic job deciding what characters are gonna teach what concepts he did excellent job and there was also some back-and-forth we would have where I would give some written feedback after he would design a tutorial or a particular lesson and we've kind of I'd be like maybe we need to find a better gap here or maybe we need to find some better frame data or is there a better move and we'd kind of go to back to the drawing board on some of them but every single one was deliberate again shout out to Mike for that stuff when designing the character specific tutorials what factors made it so a specific move or string made the cut for a tutorial session as opposed to others so we didn't talk about character

specific tutorial as much in this talk we didn't talk about him really at all and again that's because they didn't change much from injustice to to injustice to legendary addition to Mortal Kombat 11 but remember in MK 11 you kind of have these character load outs where you can choose what moves go into your character loadout and you can exclude certain moves as well because of the ones that you're selecting so the character can play very differently depending on what moves you select so that's kind of like the design of MK 11 right choose how you want to play that choose how you want to play in general makes it really difficult to teach all those permutations all the variations of a character would take ages tress to build so what we did put in the character specific tutorials though was the base move set so the base move set of a character is what we taught because we knew that was going to be common no matter what variation for a character you were choosing

is there anything you would have liked to have included but could not fit where would you like to go next to tutorials what are a few future developments to push for we kind of talked about this in the future slide but I do want to adjust this directly there's tons of places we can take it with this new foundation right we've built this very flexible structure and there's kind of all this stuff we can build on top now which is really exciting we have a lot of things in the works for future titles we've already considered a lot about what we might teach next or or what have you what we what new tools we might build so you'll have to stay tuned for that in the future again so here's my contact information this is actually the end of the talk now Q&A sessions over feel free to reach out with feedback and any ideas if you had them I love talking about this subject I'm definitely most active on Twitter so you can reach out to me there if you'd like and let's keep this conversation

going thanks for listening to my talk and you know just keep on learning