This is a Talk About Tutorials, Press A to Skip

hello can you guys hear me cool um so hi um I'm I'm not sure if we're going to have time for a Q&A because I have only 25 minutes and over 100 slides so with that in mind um hi I'm Nikolai BB most people know me exelo I uh founded that company I worked on this game I also worked on these games but these are less important because uh their browser games uh and I also talk about stuff apparently but none of that is important I'm here today to talk about the t- word that everybody skips and I'm sure you already know I'm talking about tutorials so um in short tutorials are self-paced instructional phases that provide stepbystep information in presenting a concept to the player in the context press the the trigger on a controller if you hold it in a different popups are not very efficient when it comes to like

yeah you're laughing cuz you know what I'm doing right you're laughing because we've all been there we we all know that tutorials have this bad reputation and um usually they're badly designed they they feel like the developer is holding our hand I mean have you ever wondered why her name is so similar to tutorial uh anyway it's our fault for this it's our fault that tutorials have this bad aura around them and it sucks because tutorial are super important they are the first impression you get yet on the game there are the first five minutes or the first few seconds um so with that in mind what to avoid uh first up popups stop it with the popups they're really annoying they feel like um you realize at the end of your development cycle that you figured out your players don't know how to play your game so you just slap some information on the screen really quickly and we know they're bad right cuz we make fun of them if you look at Far Cry 3 blood Dragon they make fun of popups right like how an knowing

they are and how they break experience and then you look at FR Cry 4 and they do the exact same freaking thing so please stop it with the pop ups um mostly because they break the game play and it's a horrible thing to do um if you uh want to do something like this at least embed the information within the gamees universe so it's more interesting and it doesn't break the gameplay uh and you might think oh I need a 3D game to do this no you don't you can do it in 2D games a lot of 2D games did this and it's immersive it's nice it's Blended in that uh Game World next up controller schemes stop it we've all seen these and usually you see this um actually I want to see how effective these are memorize this usually you see this before you get to play the game like in a loading screen and they don't last uh on the screen for very long so um who can tell me what the stealth button was yeah I thought so what about the collect experience orbs button

yeah you see uh the thing is uh this is information overload and showing the player something like this is the equivalent of your friend explaining the entire board game before you start playing and we all know how that feels so don't do that another thing bad controller prompts it's 2016 I shouldn't say that the game should display the correct prompts on the screen based on the controller you're using and yet that's not the case and it's really annoying seriously don't do this um this is another example this is this is Sonic and in here the character was telling me press the x button to do this and aside from the fact that the prompt was wrong the The Prompt was baked in the voice line so please please don't do that uh this is from my game this is how I think they should be done when you use your um your keyboard the keyboard prompt should show up and the instant you touch a controller they should change in real time um as well as when you touch the

mouse the cursor shows up and all the prompts disappear this is ideally how I think uh prompts should be handled and most developers don't do this because it takes a lot of time to create all the prompts for all the controllers out there so I got bored and I did that so all of these are completely free for anybody who wants to use them uh you can find them on that link and if you don't manage to take a photo of that don't worry hello you're watching this on the Vault online you're here for this link we can move on uh another thing to avoid walls of text seriously I shouldn't tell you this no player would go like oh goody my gaml is uh interrupted by a wall of text just just what I wanted don't do this um don't teach mechanics that you don't uh that you immediately lose uh prototype did this also uh Bion Commando I think did this it's a very good story tool it's called in media's res where you drop the player in the middle of the story to make it more engaging but it's is not as good when it

comes to mechanics um so avoid this so with all these things in mind like all these are bad things that you should avoid what what to do and you probably expect me to like list a huge list of things to do like uh tools and stuff but no it's super simple it's like one sentence teach gradually through experience don't break gameplay don't do any of that teach gradually through through experience uh while I working on my game over die uh it's a four player party game and I was looking at other four player party games and uh I stumbled upon this game now this was a really cool example of a good tutorial because in this game you don't only move around the level you dash around the level by uh pressing a direction uh and a button and the way they teach you that is they made the menus interactive so the way you add an uh an AI bot or a new player you do this by dashing around even selecting a level uh they make sure you understand how to to move around the

game in the menu before you start playing so this is a great example uh here's another example that I first saw on a mark Brown's uh YouTube channel game makers toolkit which you should totally check out because it's awesome uh let's say you have a game in which your character has to dismember the enemies instead of like shooting them right in ahead how do you teach the player that well if you're dead space you first write cut off their limbs on a whiteboard followed by a popup that tells you how to cut off their limbs follow Follow by an audio log that basically tells you the same thing followed by another audio log that tells you the exact same thing and you finally end in a popup called dismemberment now this is horrible but the thing is a few years early four years earlier a little game came out called halflife 2 that did the exact same thing and the first thing they do is they put the image of a dismembered body in your mind by showing you this and then you move on and you're like you

stumble upon this and you're like okay and you try to move on and you notice that a table is blocking your way so you jump on it you see some saw blades and you pick them up and the moment you pick them up a zombie wanders in your view and your first reaction is to get startled and to press the fire button and that shoots out the saw blade and it shows you that it's a very effective weapon against zombies now that's teaching gradually through experience uh half lifee 2 is filled with examples like these like uh the barnacles the enemies that are on the ceiling and they suck you up with their tongue and kill you uh the way you are introduced to these enemies is in a very safe environment you see a bird flying to their tongue and you can immedi immediately see how they work without being put into danger later on you you move on you stumble upon some barrels uh you knock them over and they just so happen to slide in a barnacle Tong and uh now you know there are some explosive barrels in the game so you put the two and two together and you realize that maybe you can do something like this

which is really cool because you as a player figure this out if halflife 2 would come out today they would probably be like huge arrows like hey you can combine these two things and explosions uh and other things as well like the exploding zombies uh they're presented be behind the wall when you were playing Fetch with dog you weren't actually playing fetch they were teaching you how to destroy the helicopter uh or how to avoid these uh little annoying things uh and there are more traditional tutorials in the game but they are baked within that Universe they are characters addressing your character or like things uh things Wren written on walls or it's it's within that univers it's immersive uh so don't treat your players like morons uh one of the best examples out there that I'm sure all of you know is Mario of course and this is a game that came out in 85 where you couldn't really afford to use text on the screen that much or popups because we all know how they went anyway the thing is uh with Mario this is a great example because they teach you gradually through experience and I'm not

going to go into detail just Google this there are so many videos on this uh and they kept doing that with further with future iteration uh like for example this is how they teach you that you can double jump by just having a subtle trail of coins uh and in later titles uh in Super Mario 3D World where um they introduce new mechanics almost every level and they gradually ramp up the difficulty which is awesome um so yes teach gradually through experience um some other amazing examples is Mega Man X where they teach you almost almost all the games mechanics in the first level sidas had a great episode on that God of War where you take down a boss in the first level using one button and that makes you feel super powerful and portal which is my favorite game which is basically a tutorial the whole thing but it doesn't feel like one that's why it's so good um challenges now there are some challenges for example uh real-time strategy games are a bit harder to teach the mechanics of so what you would do in

a case like this is um handcraft uh like a single player uh Campaign which is what most games do uh most RTS games do uh for example in my game in move or die it's a four-player party game where the rules change every 20 seconds and I had to make sure that all the players sitting on the same couch know the rules of the game without making it annoying and the way I did that is by showing this it's the the roles of the game mode in one sentence and also a little animation in case you don't like reading now the thing is I had to make sure the players know how much time they have left uh to read this info and to understand it before it disappears because if I allow any player to skip this there might be players who are left out because they didn't get to read it or if I don't allow players to skip it those who already know the rules will get bored so the the way I did this is I uh added the the information at the bottom of the screen and I made it slowly move upwards so the player knows

subconsciously how much time he has to read this before it's gone because once it reaches the top it's going to disappear and that's uh that's basically um allowing you to focus on the contents of the of the rules without having to worry that oh God it's going to disappear because we'll all we have all been on the subway next to somebody who's reading a newspaper and you're trying to read it as well and you read it really fast because you're afraid they're going to turn the page it's that feeling and it's horrible alternatively the bad way of doing this would be to have like a time left uh progress bar which would be horrible because it would um put your uh attention on that instead of the actual contents um so yes testing tutorials this is uh really weird because you have to basically go through friends because you have to make sure those who test your tutorial uh have never tried your game before uh and um a very important thing don't don't be a backseat gamer when somebody tests your game don't try to explain what's happening what's going on let the game

uh work on its own because you won't be there when people play the game in their own house um and just a little side note when somebody's giving you feedback on your tutorial or on your game overall just take it in and figure out what to do with it later don't try to justify why things are the way they are just take it all in um attention span now if you were working on a game like 10 years ago you could probably assume that the player will spend some time with it but nowadays if your tutorial annoys the player he'll just close the game and move to the other one because there's so many games nowadays and it's so easy to get distracted um so the even the the first few minutes of the game have to be very very engaging for example I come from a browser games background from flash games background and this is one game that uh I worked on in which you control two characters at the same time the small character with WD and the big characters by clicking on the screen to move him and I tried so many ways to teach the players this and nothing work nobody understood it and then I kind of

gave up and I did this which I'm not really proud of but hey it works um and yes in flash games even if the loading screen is bothering the player they'll just close the tab so another thing to keep in mind game literacy this is uh the Assumption you make as a developer uh of how much the player knows about games in general so for example you can assume that the player doesn't know anything and you have to to teach them everything from looking around with the mouse or moving around with wsd which is what OverWatch does um or you can uh be like plads uh inside where they assume you know everything and they don't tell you anything this is the first thing you see when you open the game and you have to figure out that you move with the joystick they don't tell you anything there are no prompts on the screen um and in my point of view this makes the game better for example in here they could easily tell you press a to jump but they don't do that they allow you to figure that on your own and it makes the game more Moody it's

better uh because it benefits the game uh there's also the option of no tutorials now it's not written in stone that all games need to have a tutorial for example star seed Pilgrim it's a game where it doesn't tell you what to do on purpose it's about mystery it's about figuring out how uh the game works and the game is better because of this uh also Pokémon go uh now uh let's not discuss if it's finished or not cuz it's not even 1.0 yet but the thing is uh for example I didn't know that I can spin the ball or how the Pokemon tracker worked and these are things that I found out from other players in the real world that came up to me and explain these mechanics to me and that made the game better for me it it encouraged the social aspect of the game and then I explained those things to other players so regardless if they designed it like that or not it made the game better from my point of view um so in case you have like very weird mechanics you can still

make uh things easy to understand without simplifying your mechanics and you do this by using standards now um we all know Green is good red is bad uh we all know that lava is bad you don't have to tell the player to avoid it it's very instinctive uh in case you're making uh an um interface red is usually used for health blue is for Mana some developers use green for health and blue is still Mana unless you're making an anime fighter in which case you just use all the colors there are or Spider-Man but yeah anyway um we take this for granted and the player already knows that red is bad and um you can you can even take these standards and flip them on their head to make fun of the player if the if your game allows you to do that and it makes the experience better uh other call things key standards now we all know that in a shooter for example you move with wsd e is the use key f is flashlight uh

control control is Crouch and um yeah yes unlike colors please don't change this please keep these standards because otherwise you will end up with something like this which you don't want to do because it's very weird um so yeah you can use all these to make your games more um in uh more more engaging basically um directing attention now tutorials aren't aren't only about teaching mechanics uh they're also about navigating uh a space or like basically directing where the player will go next and for that we can use things like contrast all the games use this and it's super super effective because it's very subtle it's not like an arrow pointing where you have to go for example in this in this uh screenshot you already know where you're going to go next strictly because of the lighting um other games do it more directly by using like uh cables for uh for example in the witness you solve

digital puzzles and they're connected by cables and once you solve one the cable lights up leading you to the next puzzle so if your game allows portal does the same thing you should do this because it's a more direct way to to um tell the player where to go um other games are like super blunt about it and they just have a magical flly orb telling you where to go uh so yeah other things localization now I'm not talking about uh translating your game but uh we've all played uh Playstation games we all know that X is confirmed and circle is back but have you ever played a Japanese game and figure out that they they're flipped around and you were very confused for a few minutes like I was so yes uh things not might be uh the same everywhere so keep in mind where your game will be played and um take all these things uh into into consideration uh controllers are another very interesting thing um uh to make your game more intuitive for example a trigger on a controller feels like pulling a trigger on a gun or like

accelerating a vehicle uh the weote is designed to be used as a sword and more many games uh take advantage of that uh and VR controllers are they end uh open up so many possibilities for example this is uh something I really like from hover junkers it's a game where you reload your Revol your Revolver by pressing the trackpad you rotate your thumb on the trackpad so you put the bullets in and you just slap the chamber back in which is a very intuitive thing to do you don't have to tell the player press X to reload um for example when I got the Oculus touch controllers uh the first time I got them I looked at the thumb sticks and I noticed that the surface is uh shiny and I was like that's horrible who would do such a thing but then I realized that there are actually capacitive surfaces that are also used on the triggers and US developers can use those to figure out if the finger is touching that surface or not and based on that alone we can allow the player to do very uh intuitive

gestures without pressing any button just by moving their hands so like things like these are super exciting for the future and like for Designing more intuitive um tutorials um and uh VR VR in general is super interesting because for example in Fruit Ninja they don't have to teach you how to swing a sword you already know how to do that it's intuitive uh in um space pirate trainer they don't have to teach you how to avoid bullets it's it's very intrinsic that when you see a projectile coming towards you you lean in the other direction and that's a mechanic of the game um and that's why it's so natural to interact with things in VR because once you remap the the hands in the virtual world you just interact naturally with everything around you uh for more traditional kind of text or buttons they they are usually mapped on the controller so they follow your controller uh and uh the interesting thing about VR is that in traditional games you would usually tell the player the goal and how to get to

the goal now in VR you don't necessarily have to do that for example in um in budget cuts they don't tell you press the trigger to grab an object they just tell you try picking stuff up and you do that naturally because it feels natural so that's super super interesting uh as well as uh even better closing things and interacting with things just by touching them without pressing any button like closing a drawer with your forehead that's amazing but yeah teach gradually through experience now uh I want you to think about a really really great tutorial like a mind-blowing tutorial that you you played most likely one that I haven't mentioned here and uh and think about that and think what made that tutorial great now you might have some trouble doing that like I did because the conclusion of this talk and the conclusion I reached is the best tutorial is the one nobody

remembers thank [Applause] [Music] you so I'm not sure how we are on time but do we have time for any questions are we good on time five we have five minutes for questions so Sho away cool no questions it means I addressed everything oh there's a question is there a microphone that we can get there it's coming wait for it

sorry Vault viewers this taking for hour that was complicated hello hi uh thank you very much for the talk it was very interesting I just have a little question in terms of uh environmental design you know when people are building the whole thing the level or the open world for example how would you like to how would you like address the issue of navigating the player you mentioned nice examples with contrast and with the shiny wires and everything but maybe there are some more ways that you could use you know the environment to guide the player let them how to move and so on thank you so there are a lot of ways to direct the player within a level through level design by maybe shaping objects like arrows or having uh or using a lot of color like mirrors Edge for example like the runnner vision uh and there are a lot of ways of doing that um and uh I would say contrast is the most used one because it's so easy to use and it's so subtle uh but overall I would say tutorials is

mostly level design like that's the most important part because as I mentioned halflife 2 most of the things you learn there is through level design so not like UI elements so that's why level design is super interesting um but yeah I can't really think of that many other uh ways of um directing the player around even though I'm sure there are tons of them thank you very much thank you yes yeah thanks great talk uh my question is what do you think of prologues for tutorials of what prologues so that you start the game with something very interesting like a big bang that really they try to to to uh get into the people's mind that they really wow them yeah I know that's that's great and that's basically what uh God of War did when they let you take down a whole Boss by using one button which makes the clear input very easy

but what's on screen is very impressive uh and yes you're encouraged to do that as long as that doesn't imply giving mechanics that you then take away because that that feels like dangling a carrot in front of the player and be like hey look at all these awesome things that you will play with but later and then you take them away uh so yeah that's that's encouraged thanks hi hello thank you spectacular presentation um what do you think or how would you introduce item shops or currency shops in free to-play mobile games because they are often part of the tutorial and I think there's no good way right so I don't I don't think it's I don't think it's necessarily a thing with like mobile games or freet toplay games uh but we're talking you're talking about a UI element like introducing a mechanic through the UI and basically the secret secret of that is what I kept saying like teach things gradually so for example if have a piece of UI that is not used right away don't

show that and teach like show a very Bare Bones version of the UI where can where the player can navigate it really easily uh and then gradually introduce more and more things you can direct the player uh through the UI as well by like having elements of it flash or like animate subtly please just don't use huge arrows like press on this now press on this but it's like the secret The Secret of all tutorials is to teach things gradually cool and yes I think that's all the time we had and thank you again