How to design a great tutorial
Everyone has a favourite video game tutorial. Maybe it's the first hour of Fallout 3, which quite literally treats you as a baby, teaching you new mechanics at different stages of growth? Perhaps it's Half-Life 2's iconic tutorial that packs everything you need to know into four words and one empty can of soda?
Whether you feel developers' fingerprints at the start of your virtual journey or not, tutorials are an essential part of the experience. While a well-crafted tutorial can leave players hungry for more, one with less thought put into it might diminish the chances of them ever returning.
There are many tried and tested ways to onboard players into new experiences, yet some are more memorable and effective than others. To uncover the key ingredients and design principles behind compelling tutorials, we spoke with several game designers who were happy to share their insights.
Depending on the mileage of your gaming and tutorial-design experience, you might know that there's no one-fits-all framework for crafting a perfect tutorial. Rather, it all relies on the genre and complexity of your game.
Studio MDHR's Cuphead, for example, packs everything the player needs to know in order to finish the game in a tightly-crafted, snack-sized tutorial level. And yet, the same onboarding approach wouldn't work for more atypical titles such as Chants of Sennaar or Kerbal Space Program, because it would simply end up being too overwhelming.
"There's always this fear of [players] thinking, 'This is the level of guidance I can expect from this game.' Have them understand that the tutorial is over and now you're on your own
As the campaign designer responsible for easing players into Deathloop, a game that introduced a time-loop mechanic to Arkane Lyon's celebrated immersive sims catalogue, Dana Nightingale ran into this conundrum as well. The solution, as she explains, was to break new information down and drip-feed it to players.
"We had to space things out and really dedicate
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