PRESSED HAM
- A.L. Utterback
- Jun 13, 2017
- 6 min read
Updated: Aug 11, 2020
Explicit vs. Implicit tutorials
Welcome back to Player Experience, the blog that talks about using UX and Game Design together to make your games awesome! Last month I promised to talk more about tutorials, so I’m going to talk today about tutorials I call “Hand-Holders.” These are tutorials that lead you through a completely curated initial experience with bouncing arrows, pre-determined results, and lots and lots of reading. While it may seem like you’re helping the player learn by showing them each of the game’s mechanics in a controlled environment, what you’re really doing is keeping them from actually playing your game, or digesting any of the information you’re giving them. You can create a much more fun, engaging, and potentially less expensive initial experience by putting your UX and Game Designer brains together!
Hand-Holders are an example of explicit gaming instruction as opposed to implicit instruction, and it’s the difference between wearing tight pants and mooning someone - they’re both about showin’ off the butt, but while one is sexy, the the other is downright rude. Let’s look at some examples with our friend, Maple.
Here, we show an item crafting screen. Let’s walk through an explicit instruction of how the crafting system works.
We begin with a big, arresting image of Maple, ensuring that we can’t miss her, and just to be safe, we don’t allow our player to tap anything else or otherwise escape the tutorial. She uselessly assures us we’re going to love it(somehow I doubt it).
Now we’re in the crafting menu, but how did we get here? Maple tells us we’re going to craft a flower(killing any surprise and delight we might have gained), and she’s put the materials in our inventory already as well(how do I get items?).
We get a big honkin' arrow again, pointing at our first ingredient. Good thing too, because somehow we have a huge inventory of items already.
Now she’d like us to put it in the first crafting slot...which slot is it? Can’t be sure, because none of them are labelled.
Ah, I see, it was the one she was in front of. We can tell because it’s lit up with another helpful arrow.
Now Maple would like us to add a flower bud to the second slot. I have a lot of flowery-looking things in my inventory... I’m not sure which one is the flower bud.
Oh, good, another arrow & another highlight to show us- Alright, alright, you get the idea. This is a tutorial that holds your hand through the entire experience, not letting the player figure anything out for themselves. Not only does your player not actually retain the information when taught this way, it also patronizes them, making them feel annoyed rather than engaged. This doesn’t mean you should cut your tutorial altogether and leave your player stranded - instead, try teaching them implicitly by showing them a mechanic, then letting them practice & experiment with it in a safe environment. Let’s look at an example.
Here the player is approached, not with a tutorial, but a scripted event. If Maple approaches the bee, it will sting her.
If the player waits, however, a friendly butterfly will fly down and land on a flower bud.
When it does so, the flower blooms, and that gets the bee's attention.
The bee buzzes over, lands on the flower, and takes a less aggressive stance, hiding its stinger. Maple can now pass by unperturbed.
What does this scripted event have to do with a tutorial? Let’s go to the next area, where Maple finds an uprooted flower bud, and a butterfly caught in a spiderweb.
When Maple walks on top of the flower bud, she automatically picks it up, and she gets a notification on the UI that it’s been added to her inventory. This is different from our bouncing arrow, because it’s not explicitly forcing you to go into the menu - it’s just a little reminder telling you where you can find the item again if you choose to. As we’ll see, however, the player will be implicitly forced to enter the menu soon.
Now Maple walks forward and uh-oh, there’s another mean bee ahead, and no flowers in sight. She automatically picks up the butterfly when she walks over it and another notification appears. If you REALLY want your player to go in the inventory, leave the notification there until they go into the menu.
With no discernible way to progress, the player enters the menu, which saw a considerable amount of action before this point. They see four categories, all of which have written out names. There’s no tutorial explaining what each type of item does, but the names used implicitly tell our player what they do. Now, there’s nothing in the “throwables” tab, but the glowing “craftables” tab suggests there might be something there. This is a classic “new item” system that’s not just useful for the tutorial, but for the rest of the game, so players know where to find items they’ve just picked up.
Inside the craftables menu they find the two items they picked up - the butterfly and the flower bud (we specify FLOWER bud, by the way, to implicitly tell the player it grows into a flower). Beneath the list of items are 3 slots set up like a math problem. The two small slots adding together to equal a larger slot implicitly suggests to our player that putting two items into those slots will create something, similar to two numbers combining to make a larger number. Another implicit suggestion is the fact that you only have two items in this craftables menu - and, surprise surprise, it’s two items you’ve seen combine previously in the scripted event. The butterfly landing on the flower bud earlier turned it into a flower, which got you past that nasty bee!
With a single tap or click, the first item they click automatically goes into the first crafting slot.
The second item goes in the same way, and now the result is lit up. Though we don’t know what it will make yet(implied by the question mark), we know that it will make something, because the craft button and the result both lit up.
Our player hits craft and we get an exciting, celebratory animation or pop-up, showing the result. You made a flower! Just to drive it home, a little message at the bottom describes the item, which as our player likely already guessed, attracts and mollifies bees.
We go back to crafting, but now there’s nothing here...however, the same way the crafting tab had lit up when it had new items, the “throwables” tab has now lit up the same way, Keep in mind, this is not a tutorial function - it’s useful UI polish that happens to also help us with our tutorial.
The player finds the flower in the “throwables” tab, and what’s implicitly suggested by it being automatically sorted into that tab? That it can be thrown! Our player taps the flower, we show it selected, implicitly reiterating its function with a description, and implicitly reiterating what can be done with it using a “throw” button.
Our player hits “throw,” the flower blooms, and the bee sees it immediately.
He lands on the flower, and our player knows from earlier they can walk right by!
That was a tutorial wrapped in a simple puzzle. Never did we interrupt gameplay, and never did we explicitly force the player through some kind of flow. Our player didn’t have to have their hand held - instead they felt clever for figuring it all out themselves, and better than that, they will remember how to craft & throw items from here on out because they took their time and actively engaged with that menu.
This method is great for developers as well - why? Because the only extraneous bit that needed to be implemented was a single scripted event - the butterfly landing on the flower bud. Everything else was designed within systems that are already built into the game at large. No rushing to plug in a horrible, hand-holdy tutorial at the end of development, so long as your game designer(or you, if you’re the game designer!) designs their first few levels around teaching your player.
If you as a designer ever find yourself explaining a system to a tester over their shoulder or saying “You’ll learn that in the tutorial,” take a moment, check yourself, and think about how you could alter the game design to teach your player implicitly through gameplay. Give your game some sexy, tight jeans - don’t just stick its ass against your player’s screen.
Phew! That was a long one. Will talk more about other methods for implicitly teaching your players, but for now, check out these great videos on tutorials & implicitly teaching players through game & level design:
Comments