You’ve spent countless hours honing your game’s mechanics, perfecting its visuals, and fine-tuning its storyline. Then, it becomes time to introduce your players to your virtual world, grasp its intricacies, and immerse them in the gameplay.
That’s where tutorials come in. They serve as the gateway for players to step into your game universe with confidence and excitement.
After an interesting discussion on the topic between Aida, our Community manager, and Clare, one of our lead designers, we compiled some important points to consider when crafting the onboarding experience for your players.
Table of Contents
Identifying your needs
The tutorial is a valuable tool for onboarding players, providing essential guidance, and ensuring a smooth gaming experience. However, some genres might need it more than others, and it’s essential to strike a balance between providing enough instructions and allowing players to explore and learn at their own pace.
So when should you design a tutorial? As a general principle, adding a tutorial of some kind is needed whenever:
- You are introducing a new mechanic to players.
- Players have to deal with complex gameplay systems.
- You want to include players that are unfamiliar with the genre or with low skill.
But tutorials are not always needed, or at least not for every mechanic of your game. A good example is in the poker rogue-like Balatro: while the more novel mechanics are presented in a tutorial (and some are left for you to discover, more on that later), the game never wastes time explaining how to make poker hands (i.e. pairs, full houses, etc.), as it assumes players understand this well enough.
Blending the tutorial seamlessly with the narrative
Some games might use their story to introduce players to the basic controls and mechanics in the first moments of the game, and every time a new mechanic is introduced. This helps avoid creating a separate teaching moment in the game and focuses on keeping the players actively engaged.
In action-adventure games, seamlessly integrating tutorial elements into the narrative not only instructs players on specific game mechanics but also immerses them deeper into the storyline, turning basic tutorial segments into rich player experiences.
Take titles like Half-Life I&II or God of War (2018), for example, where the narrative-driven journey naturally unfolds alongside the player’s learning curve. From interacting with the environment to mastering different weapons, players organically acquire essential skills as they progress through the narrative without the need for explicit tutorials.
Half-Life II tutorial when you are introduced to the suit, the tutorial is blended with the narrative.
Gradually introduce players to mechanics (throughout the game)
Another typical way to deal with tutorials is to break it down, spread it out, and concentrate on teaching one new mechanic or control at a time. This is common in games with a strong level structure, such as puzzle games, action-adventure games, or any game that gradually adds content throughout the experience.
The usual formula for breaking down the gameplay is to:
- First, introduce the mechanic in a clear and concise way.
- Then provide a safe space for players to experiment and familiarize themselves with its applications.
- Give the player a challenge that specifically requires them to master that mechanic, and
- Finally, gradually increase the complexity, leading up to challenges that require using several mechanics together.
This deliberate use of the game’s pacing ensures that players are never overwhelmed by the game, while still building up to more complex situations for them to tackle.
This approach not only keeps players actively engaged but also instills a rewarding sense of accomplishment as they overcome increasingly challenging obstacles in a way that feels personal.
Portal (2007) progressively introduces mechanics but also expands
on each mechanism following the same crescendo of new mechanics and challenges.
Encouraging hands-on learning
Providing space for players to experiment with mechanics can be a great way to encourage them to take an active role in the learning process, rather than relying on passively receiving instructions.
Not only can this help them master the game’s systems and mechanics, but it can also cultivate a deeper sense of investment in the game world.
A great example is Inside (2016), which never explicitly indicates how to play other than through direct gameplay, experimentation, and clear communication of what is expected from the player. The controls are quite simple (move right, left, jump, and interact), yet through precise character animation and clear level design, navigating the game’s spaces feels extremely engaging and participates in the narrative tension the designers endeavor to convey to the players.
Games like “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” also excel in this. Nintendo gives players room to explore and interact with the game world, offering them occasional tips and only if they spend a considerable time on a task or puzzle. This open-ended and tutorial-light approach allows players to interact with the world in the way and at the pace that best suits them, creating a memorable and deeply personal gaming journey.
Inside (2016) tutorial let’s you discover how to play learning from the environment and characters moves.
Making learning part of the game
In certain games, learning is an integral part of the gameplay experience, and leaving the intricacies of systems and mechanics unexplained part of the design.
Rather than creating tutorials, these games prioritize crafting intuitive mechanics so that players can discover and master the more nuanced aspects of gameplay on their own. Construction-focused titles such as Factorio and Minecraft exemplify this approach, as do rogue-lite games where “discoverability” is central to the gameplay experience.
The recent Balatro, for example, uses a straightforward core rule set that is immediately understandable because of players’ common knowledge and strong gameplay expectations of poker.
In Balatro, many exotic mechanics overlap the simple and well-understood poker game.
The game has an otherwise complex set of systems that can be difficult to navigate at first.
However, players learn the intricacies of the game through repeated play (The order of the jokers is important, planet cards scale faster for higher-scoring hands, hidden hand types, etc.). This combination of intuitive mechanics and initially obscure systems makes the game easy to approach but challenging to master.
Leveraging outside tools
In the past, game studios utilized external resources like game magazines and expansive manuals to supplement the gameplay experience, providing tips, cheats, and insights. Titles like SimEarth (1990), had large manuals (236 pages) that not only served as tutorial material but were also crammed with humor and actual scientific data.
Learning about tectonic movement in the SimEarth (1990) user manual.
Today, with games featuring high discoverability, complex systems, and extensive content, players often rely on player-maintained wikis, streaming platforms, and YouTube walkthroughs for guidance and community interaction.
More than just a way of learning a game’s mechanic, however, these resources also serve as a canvas for a social layer to solo gaming experiences, enhancing immersion and boosting a sense of community among players.
Players’ massive adoption of outside tools has effectively helped modern games extend beyond the screen, making knowledge sharing and collaboration an integral part of even the most solo game.
Minecraft wiki made by fans, it is super useful for players.
When all else fails, make it short and skippable.
When all else fails, simplicity is key. If your attempts to seamlessly integrate tutorials into the narrative or encourage hands-on learning haven’t resonated with your audience, it may be time for a more traditional approach.
In multiplayer games, for example (especially competitive ones), the typical onboarding methods might not be enough. In such cases, we should keep in mind player expectations. In the case of multiplayer games, despite the complexity of the systems, online players usually expect to jump in and play with their friends on the first try. This often can lead to frustrating experiences where tutorials become an obstacle to the fun. Instead of lengthy multi-stage tutorial levels, imbued with the game’s narrative and strewn with cutscenes, the following principles might be more appropriate in such cases:
- Prioritizing concise and informative tutorials,
- Focusing on what is the most vital for players to know,
- Allowing players to skip them if they wish (and come back to them later),
- Ensuring players always have access to essential information through in-menu recaps, video snapshots, or in-game tips.
A good example of this is Blizzard’s Overwatch which offers a succinct and skippable tutorial, but also training areas to try out characters on your own, non-competitive death match games while waiting for matchmaking, and a clear recap of abilities on pressing F1.
Overwatch tutorial of one of the playable characters.
Accessibility should also be a priority. Incorporating options like adjustable difficulty settings or customizable controls to cater to players of varying abilities and preferences can go a long way toward a seamless onboarding experience.
Conclusion
Crafting an engaging tutorial is a multifaceted process that varies depending on the nature of your game. While the ideal scenario is to teach mechanics without the need for explicit tutorials, this isn’t always achievable.
Ultimately, a well-designed tutorial should avoid overwhelming players with information and instead focus on providing a context for players to learn at their own pace.
Lessons learned from analyzing effective tutorials highlight the importance of blending tutorial elements into gameplay, introducing mechanics gradually, and prioritizing what to teach the player. But other avenues can be found to help with onboarding players, such as providing accessibility options, using visual language to help guide players (i.e. the notorious yellow paint level designers cover their ledges with) or adaptive messaging (i.e. tips given to players that spend too much time in a puzzle area).
If you’re eager to explore this topic further, we recommend checking out George Fan’s talk, How I Got My Mom to Play Plants vs Zombies, which offers valuable insights into effective tutorial design practices.
If you are struggling to create the best onboarding for your players, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’ve got your back!
Brave Zebra
We colaborate with Indie Game Studios and Publishers to develop inspiring games.
