LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

This was a very quick game of mafia.

F

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.

My strategy for a very long time has been to always be working on two game projects. That way, when I get frustrated or bored or overwhelmed or have writers block, and need to take a break from one, I automatically start working on the other instead of just watching Twitch or playing the FF4 randomizer. It helps my productivity a lot.

Well UOSSMUD is an online multiplayer game that was "released" 22 years ago but is still getting new features added, like how MMORPGs or mobile games keep getting new features. I mean it's literally just a tiny MMORPG with a text-based interface instead of a graphical one. And every time I make an RPG Maker game by myself, it takes ten years due to a combination of scope creep, procrastination, and perfectionism. So I feel like if you're planning to release a complete game and then not have constant updates for the next decade, I have no useful input.

Now, if you want to know more about releasing constant updates to an existing online game, I can certainly share my experiences. But I probably need a more specific question than just "How do you make games?"