TUTORIAL CHICKEN NUGGETS
- A.L. Utterback
- May 9, 2017
- 4 min read
Welcome to Player Experience! I’m A.L., and I’m a professional UX and Game Designer. I’ve created Player Experience to talk about Game Design and UX and where they overlap. Nothing exemplifies this more than the almighty(and often dreaded) tutorial! For that reason, my first few blog posts are going to be about how to create great game tutorials.
How many of us have suffered through a long tutorial, full of text walls, bouncing arrows, and hand-holding, only to dump us out into the wilderness of the game like a high-school graduate trying to balance their checkbook? We skip paragraphs of explanation because we want to play the damn game already, but then we’re thrown into the game and are completely lost. Designers, at this point we tend to commit the cardinal UX sin of blaming our user, but there is a better way. Stop trying to feed your players a whole chicken at once - cut it up, deep fry it, and give them some damn dipping sauce! Make your tutorial bite-sized.
Let’s create a fake tutorial to show you what I mean. Here’s Maple, the player-character of an action/platformer game. The first thing my player needs to know is movement, so here’s our first level.
I don’t say “use the thumbstick to move” or have a giant bouncing arrow pointing at the tree. All I do directly is set the goal: “get to the tree.” What’s important here is, due to the extremely basic level design, there is nothing else the player could possibly do - the text only exists to reinforce what the level design already tells our player. They will get to the tree, because they can’t not get to it. Now we could either end the level here:
...or we can roll more tutorial into this first level. The next thing we need to teach the player is jumping.
Here again we limit our player’s options. They can go back where they came(a whole lot of nothing), or tackle the obstacle ahead - a wall barring them from the next tree. Jumping is a pretty standard trope in games, and a necessity in a platforming game, so unless you mapped jump to some obscure button, the player should generally play around with the controls and figure out the jump button quickly when they see Maple jump on screen. But they don’t need to just jump straight up - they need to move and then jump in a direction. This not only teaches them jump, but reinforces movement. Now, we move on.
Notice that we’ve removed the text, but underneath that crispy, deep-fried graphical coating, the player has been learning that trees are the breadcrumbs they need to follow to get through the level. To achieve that goal, they’re going to figure out that they need to jump across this gap - why? Because it’s the same puzzle as before, but this time with some added danger - or in other words, it’s the same chicken nugget(jumping), but with some zesty dipping sauce(the risk of falling to your death). But why teach the same thing twice? Why didn’t we use this puzzle for the first introduction to jumping?
Remember, this is the first time a player has ever jumped in your game - they don’t know how far they can jump or how high - they don’t know how it feels.
We want to bar them from progressing without learning to jump, but at the same time, we want to give them a safe environment, allowing them to stumble and make mistakes without deadly consequences.
Then, we want to up the stakes, so the player feels just a little bit of pressure, encouraging them the use the jump with finesse.
Let’s move on to another mechanic. See this guy walking towards you? What can we deduce, just from the way this guys looks and moves? (note that the text in color is the enemy action, not something our player would see on screen)
Well, firstly, he looks a little mean. Give him a menacing gait and an aggressive soundboard, and it’s pretty certain our player will assume he’s an enemy. But what else? Well, he looks a little like an archery target. What do you typically do with archery targets?
Shoot them! Again, as long as you don’t need to use an odd button for shooting, the player should, though a bit of trial and error, figure out what the shoot button is and execute it. They may have even learned it already from messing around with the buttons during the jump tutorial(a benefit of not just saying “hit x to jump”). Also, take note of the enemy’s path here - he walks back and forth so that our player has a safe spot from which to shoot without the danger of an impending attack. And, if you want be absolutely sure the player learns shooting here and doesn't just jump over the enemy...
Remove the option to jump using the level design. Tutorials are often about stripping the experience down to the single thing you want your player to learn, and giving them only one option: do the thing. Don’t give them the whole chicken all at once - give them the nuggets, one at a time, and don’t just let ‘em smell those yummy nugs - let them eat them! Only when the player gets to use a mechanic do they truly learn & retain it. This also keeps your player from feeling bored and exhausted by a lengthy tutorial - instead, it will just feel like they’re playing the first level of the game.
We’ll do some more tutorial talk with Maple later on, but until then, check out these great videos about the convergence of game design & tutorials:
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