TUTORIALS

Include a tutorial for systems unique to your game. I believe tutorials should be as brief as possible and skipable (which helps with replayability). If you find that you're using a ton of words when explaining something, it can most likely be condensed.

I like to assume that anybody who plays my game is familiar with RPGs already, and are of reasonable intelligence, so that I don't have to explain how to use the party change menu, for example.

The only way to go about it is to ideally find someone who's close to the target audience (someone who likes playing rpgs, someone who's used to playing rpgmaker games, etc.) get them to play the game in-front of you or record footage. Do not tell them what to do and simply observe. You'll get a lot of notes on what they ignored, what went over their head and probably what you communicated badly on. Interview them on what they thought everything was for. This is way more helpful than your (probably) baseless assumptions. I would even just throw someone at your game without any tutorials implemented to control for stuff that might not be necessary.

It's essentially this video because although this is a huge extreme and probably shouldn't be your typical test subject, it does inform how most video games just aren't intuitive at all. They rely on existing games or being a common genre that most people are used to. More importantly you have to draw the line somewhere on who your game is for and that's crucial to figure out beyond just teaching the player how to play. Because "Why does your player want to play the game? What are they getting out of it?" is ultimately connected to it.

Try out Xenoblade Chronicles 2, it has the worst fucking tutorials ever made. But it's also a good lesson. Because as someone who's played a lot of video games and RPGs and have suffered through really obtuse games, XC2 just baffles me. Tutorials never end even 20 hours into the game, there's too much information to remember (which is a problem with the battle system itself), and it relies on big paragraphs and screenshots sometimes to get its point across. Even when it forces you to do the action... I don't know why I did it or what priority it should have in fights. Then again it probably isn't for me either, there's probably some tentpole anime-combo RPG I didn't play that would've eased me into it.

I'm going to talk about my personal answer of the tutorial for Draug's Resurrection. I'm not saying whether or not it's by any means a valid or good answer, but I think I'm making the most of the situation.

Because of a bug on some (most?) machines, the engine is unstable before the player assumes control for the first time. So I tried to make the most of it. You get a couple dialogue boxes before you're dumped into a small area with the tutorial-person (Eric), and you're given control in under a minute. Nothing fancy, just straight to getting to do something.

From there, you can talk to Eric if you want, and his tutorial is split into two sections; one for the Menu system and one for the Battle system. The player isn't actually in control, but the tutorials are accompanied by pre-printscreened images of said parts of the Menu/Battle system, showing you what's being talked about. I personally think that's plenty; I don't really like when a game physically forces you to go through menus, ESPECIALLY when it makes you do dumb actions, like drink an Elixir for no reason or force you to fuse Arsene into a Slime. You also get an option to fight against Eric, to test out all the battle mechanics in a low-stress environment.

You also have the option to completely ignore him, or only do a portion of it. If you ignore Eric, the player character (Clair) will adopt a more impatient attitude towards Eric for the next half-hour or so, but this ultimately affects nothing but some dialogue. For what it's worth, the tutorial isn't actually Eric telling you stuff, but Clair telling HIM stuff, and all the dialogue is handled as in-universe talking and training. It might make it a little long-winded as a result, but I think it's less dull for it, and Eric tends to directly voice what I'd think are the most common misconceptions of how things work. DR's systems are fairly unorthodox.

What I think is the most relevant is that the tutorial is accessible within seconds of starting a new file. If you're unclear on anything, it's incredibly quick and easy to boot up a new file and re-read the sections that concern you. For better or worse, those two tutorial sections don't really hold back on going over most details and kind of front-loads things; stuff like Ailments, Tomes, and Personal Skills aren't generally going to see huge play right off the bat are mentioned. That said, a lot of little things are accessible right off the bat if you want to poke around and customize immediately. You start with extra weapons in your inventory, you can immediately swap your Personal Skill around, and buy a Tome quite quickly, so it's not like parts of the menu are fundamentally useless until later in the game.

My hope is that if someone doesn't get things, it's no big deal for them to shelf the thought for a fair while. But if they become curious, they'll remember how quick the tutorial is to reach and how much stuff it touches on, and may feel inclined to give it another quick look.


@Darken:
While most of that video is valid, I think there's one incredibly important caveat to it; she was being silently watched and judged. People tend to get a lot more skittish when others are watching, not wanting to either bore them or otherwise look inept, and feel silently rushed as a result. Which means less time for looking through menus, reading in general, and doing other 'boring' things, which just compounds on problems. I can't personally say how huge of a factor that was for her, but I think it's something to bear in mind.

author=dethmetal
Include a tutorial for systems unique to your game. I believe tutorials should be as brief as possible and skipable (which helps with replayability). If you find that you're using a ton of words when explaining something, it can most likely be condensed.

I like to assume that anybody who plays my game is familiar with RPGs already, and are of reasonable intelligence, so that I don't have to explain how to use the party change menu, for example.

I think there's a lot of value in having three different tutorial settings when a player starts the game for the first. One with no tutorials (for people who've played the game before), one like you described (for players who are familiar with RPGs), and one where simple concepts are also explained (for players who are not familiar with RPGs, or have maybe never even played a video game before).

Adding the ability for players to select which type of tutorials they want is incredibly easy for a developer to do. And even if only one of your thousands of players uses the full tutorial setting, I think it's worth doing, just because it's so easy to add them.

That said, I don't think tutorials for very simple concepts need anything more than a text box telling you the info you need in one or two sentences. A text box that says "You can go down pipes by pressing the down arrow" is all you need. You don't need an interactive sequence demonstrating it.

author=LockeZ
That said, I don't think tutorials for very simple concepts need anything more than a text box telling you the info you need in one or two sentences. A text box that says "You can go down pipes by pressing the down arrow" is all you need. You don't need an interactive sequence demonstrating it.

I'm picturing somebody standing next to a pipe and repeatedly squatting to no effect, just because there's always somebody that dumbwho misunderstands the context.